Humor and Politics through the Animal in Cervantes and Leopold

Part of Thomas Hobbes's argument for the need for a social contract, enforced by a sovereign power, depends on a mistaken notion about the human animal. Hobbes thought that the original "natural" state of humanity was a purely animal existence. People once lived like wolves among one another-homo lupus homini-until the accession of a sovereign who then imposed a "civilizing" order.¹ Hobbes thus proffers a fundamental misconception about the natural state of humanity: that we lived like animals prior to the signing of a "social contract" ceding absolute power to a sovereign who establishes and enforces a civil order and thus provides a political space in which our potential "humanity" can come to light.

Hobbes also proffers a fundamental misconception about animals: that they-one and all-live in a social vacuum. The choice of wolves as a metaphor for the supposed animal-like human existence in the "state of nature" is stunningly ironic. Wolves are quintessential social animals. They hunt cooperatively and share their kills; they rear their young cooperatively; and each pack is ruled by a sovereign, the alpha male.² Indeed the absolute monarchy that Hobbes believed to be the best form of government more nearly exemplifies homo lupus homini than the "state of nature," as he imagined it to exist, in which humans lived a "brutish" (that is, animal-like) life that was "solitary" as well as "poor, nasty . . . and short."³

Extending Karl Marx's critique of Hobbes's brutal assessment of human nature, Giorgio Agamben perceptively underlines the fallacy of the Hobbesian position on political sovereignty with respect to the animal.⁴ In Agamben's hand, Marx's Homo faber becomes Homo sacer. As Agamben explains, this concept too goes back to Roman law and refers to the man who is ostracized from society, stripped of all civil rights, and legally killable-except not as a religious sacrifice. No civilized state came to exist a posteriori to a state in which humans lived in a constant state of animal-like war-supposing, for the sake of argument, that animals themselves live in a constant state of war with one another. As Michel Serres points out, "war" presupposes a social contract-it is something declared and is often conducted according to "rules of engagement" and "Geneva conventions." "By definition," Serres writes, "war is a legal state"; the state of nature is one, rather, of "objective violence."⁵

In Agamben's analysis, in any case, the animal-human counterpositioning in Hobbes's argument makes no sense. As a matter of anthropological fact, humans never emerged into civilized order out of a social vacuum.⁶ The advanced civil order envisioned by Hobbes emerged from a more primitive human social order, which emerged in turn from an even more primitive prehuman primate social order. For Agamben, it is necessary to recognize the falsity of this foreshortened Hobbesian chronology of solitary animal existence, instantaneously morphing into an advanced human civil order with the accession of a sovereign. A reconceptualized post-Hobbesian political theory, Agamben argues, must include a radical rethinking of the animal in relation to the human.

Agamben argues that the genealogy of the animal needs to be understood differently from the way it is represented in the Hobbesian model. That is, we need to rethink the existence of an animality within the human that preceded the emergence of sovereign states. Agamben offers the notion of "bare life" as a way to articulate his rejection of the idea of a saltatory animal-to-human chronology and suggests a chiasmic coeval interval between the animal and the human that is neither animal nor human. Agamben is not the first European political philosopher to theorize the "bare life," any more than he is the first to challenge Hobbes's brutal representation of the human state of nature. Walter Benjamin introduces the concept toward the end of his Critique of Violence, while Agamben foregrounds it.⁷ "Bare life" (Benjamin's bloss leben, Agamben's vita nuda) is a conceptual threshold between the human and the animal...