Where is the Animal after Post-Humanism?: Sue Coe and the Art of Quivering Life

Nichts so ausdrucksvoll wie die Augen von Tieren—Menschenaffen—, die objektiv darüber zu trauern scheinen, dass sie keine Menschen sind.

There is nothing so expressive as the eyes of animals—especially apes—which seem objectively to mourn that they are not human.

(Adorno 1970, 172/113)¹

Die Philosophie ist eigentlich dazu da, das einzulösen, was im Blick eines Tieres liegt.

Philosophy actually exists in order to redeem what is to be found in the gaze of an animal.

(Adorno in conversation with Horkheimer, cited in Claussen 2003, 305/255)

Adorno’s passages on the animal gaze contain a striking contradiction. The first quotation suggests that Homo sapiens are able to interpret the incomparable look in the animal eye, even to the point that it seems that animals mourn that they are not human. This look is so intense, as if they were objectively or dispassionately reflecting upon their difference from us. This longing to cross over the species divide is further signified by the choice of the noun Menschenaffen to apply to the expressivity of the human-like animal gaze, for the uniquely German term for primates—man-apes—shows the slippage of the boundary between man and animal. As the second quotation indicates, however, this gaze is so incomprehensible, perhaps so unhuman-like, that it calls upon philosophy as its paramount task to think through and put into words all that is contained in it—to keep the promise, as it were, of what lies in the gaze of the animal. Philosophy thus becomes a field of inquiry less into the human being than into sentient animal being.² This tension—between the compelling, communicative look of the animal and philosophy’s central task to interpret its mystery—informs Derrida’s choice of the gaze of his cat to open his monumental essay “The Animal That Therefore I am.” He remarks, like Adorno, that the animal appears to be “at unease with itself” and, too, that this unease is so forceful that it holds a promise to which we surrender: “since all of time and for what remains of it to come we would therefore be in passage toward surrendering to the promise of that animal at unease with itself” (Derrida 2008, 3). Evoking the long history of philosophic inquiry he asks: “Since so long ago, can we say that the animal has been looking at us?” (3). Western philosophy, in his assessment, has not lived up to its calling as set forth by Adorno. Have philosophers even noticed that the animal has been looking at us, Derrida asks? Or have they perhaps chosen not to abandon themselves to this gaze? For what would such abandon entail for the calculating theoretical mind?

Part of that abandon for Derrida is predicated on the intimacy of his relation to his pet. This cat exemplifies Adorno’s paradox between the enigma of the animal gaze and its immediacy. Derrida calls it an “insistent gaze” but it can also be ambiguously “benevolent or pitiless . . . surprised or cognizant.” It is the “gaze of a seer, a visionary or extra-lucid blind one” (2008, 4). But what is it that this visionary creature sees and reveals in her promise, enigmatic as all promises are? Even her familiarity does not make reading this cat any easier. And Derrida’s questioning is compelling precisely because he singles out a specific animal, his own pet to which he refers in the affectionate diminutive, “a little cat.” He insists upon the fact that “the cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isn’t the figure of a cat” (6). To wit, it is the gaze of this animal that endows it with specificity or a face: Derrida and his cat stand “face to face” (4).

I recall when, on a walk in the late spring in North Carolina shortly before leaving the States, peering through a small dark opening in the rocks along the Eno River and seeing two glimmering, intense...