Another Naming, a Living Animal: Blanchot's Community

1.

The dog appears.¹ Its head is above the line. Is the dog slipping back? Its head is on the line. Is it submerging again, tasting death as the admixture of fear and the quicksand that will eventually end the ebb and flow of life? Is it scrambling futilely up a bank that no longer holds? The dog is being defined by its eventual death. While still allowing for the severity of the animal's predicament, its appearance may be precisely the ebb and flow, thus a continuity of life not structured by death but by having-to-exist.² Within what then does the dog appear? The question has force precisely because it has an exigency that cannot be escaped since neither answer nor direct resolution is at hand. The question endures. Once allowed, the question repositions the line. No longer mere appearance, the line is neither the sign of a simple division nor is it able to sustain a simple either/or. Death cannot be equated with the dark. Equally, the light cannot be reduced to the life that may be escaping. (Though it should not be forgotten that Goya's work belongs to the so-called Black Paintings.) The dog's head interrupts the line. As a result, what is opened is a site. Perhaps, to use a word that will play an important role in the analysis to come, what emerges is an écart that refuses simple and symmetrical oppositions. Before continuing, it is essential to note that this interruption occurs as the result of animal presence. If the work of death is to be stilled—and the

Francisco Goya. The Dog. 1820-23. Museo de Prado, Madrid.

stilling would be a philosophical gesture that did not resist the propriety of the question of human being, but nonetheless obviated the need for an eventual equation of that question with death—then the animal's interruptive presence may need to be maintained. To maintain it, of course, is to open the question of how a relation to the animal—a relation thought beyond the hold of the animal's death—is to be understood.

As an interim step, leading to the appearance of the animal within Blanchot's formulation of language and community, it is vital to note that the place of the animal within much philosophical and literary writing is positioned by a death that is no mere death. The animal's death is incorporated from the start within a logic of sacrifice. Securing the propriety of human being demands either the exclusion or the death of the animal. Its being positioned in such a way is premised on what can be described as the animal's privation. There would be therefore a generalized and generalizable "without relation" to the animal. The animal is held within a logic in which it enables (an enabling stemming from privation) the being of being human to take over that which is proper to it. This enabling is the result of the "without relation." This opens the question of how to account philosophically for a radically different situation—one in which the particularity of human being was not dependent on forms of privation and sacrifice. What would be the effect on being human—and thus the thinking of that being philosophically—if the maintained animal were allowed? If, that is, the "without relation" gave way to a fundamentally different form of relationality. (Were the animal to play a deconstructive role within philosophy, then the effect of its presence would need to be given in relation to this question.³)

2.

While death plays a central role in Blanchot's reflection on community, the death in question defines the being of being human. Blanchot's path of argumentation from Hegel via Kojève continues to link this particular conception of the work of death to the necessity of the animal's death (a link which, as shall be noted, reinscribes the position within a pervasive logic of sacrifice). There is therefore a doubling of death—animal death and human...