Domesticating Animal Theory

For Descartes, animals are automata like machines that merely react to stimuli, but do not have any true responses. … They are the opposite of humans who are free, rational, and have souls. … The automatic actions of animals assure us of the freedom of our own— we are not animals; therefore we are not automata.

—Kelly Oliver, Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human

I must confess that when, a few years ago, I first began to notice the emergence of theoretical interest in “animality”—especially in literary studies and philosophy—I instinctively responded with skepticism. I say that my reaction was “instinctive” in order to emphasize that my skepticism was not a reasoned position that I had arrived at through some kind of deliberation. Indeed, I had not yet read anything on the topic of animality and really knew very little about the contours of such inquiry or its conceptual stakes. At the same time, however, to call my response “instinctive” does not mean that it was devoid of a certain logic.

(As an aside, I would like to be as explicit here as I can about what I am trying to do with this short essay. That is, I would like to use this parenthetical moment to reflect, in an all-too-human way, on my own [discursive] actions. Instead of placing these “reflections” [or my “reflections” on these “reflections”] within parentheses, I would have liked to demarcate them with different colors—especially red and green—which would make the distinction invisible to dogs [according to much speculation]. It could therefore function as a kind of “dog whistle” for humans—a signal that humans could perceive but dogs could not. As a result, if a dog were reading this red-green essay, he would not be able to distinguish an action from the metalevel reflection on that action. There would merely be one action following another, perhaps winding its way around a stop sign.

In any case, to return to my reflections [still parenthetically]: here at the beginning of this short essay I would like to pose the question of the relation between my “skeptical” response to the discourse of animality and the logic of my response. Among the questions that I want to call attention to here are the following: did the logic precede my response, follow it, or were they somehow immanently linked? Is there only one logic [“the logic” of my response]? Or several [for instance, one that precedes and one that follows]? And what is its relation to me? Do I either have it or not, or is there a middle ground of logic—so that I could have it in the way that I have/don’t have my intellectual property?

I don’t have answers to these questions. At least not explicit ones. But that’s not what concerns me. What I find troubling here is that any attempt to respond to these questions seems to already have presumed an answer, presuming some kind of preexisting relation between thought and action [which is exactly the thing that I thought I was trying to question]. But if I am unable to respond to these questions without already presuming an answer, this would seem to imply that the question of the relationship between thought and action cannot finally be resolved through reasoned inquiry. Or, to phrase this more precisely, it might indicate that only a certain style of “instinctive” response—a certain style of “thoughtlessness” or “nonrationality”—can enable us to distinguish an instinctive response from a thoughtful, rational, deliberate one.

I raise these issues because it seems to me that they point to crucial questions about “animality” [and not only because they introduce the proverbial “chicken and egg” scenario]. That is, one of the key distinguishing attributes of the human is its alleged ability to reflect on its actions through logos [both as reason and language]. Without this reflective rationality, these so-called responses aren’t really [human] responses at all, but might be better termed “reactions” [see especially Derrida 2008, 32]. That is to say, the whole conception of the human and its...