Toward a Philosophical Anthropology of Nonhuman Animals

In medieval iconography, the ape holds a mirror in which the man who sins must recognize himself as simian dei [ape of God]. In Linnaeus’s optical machine, whoever refuses to recognize himself in the ape, becomes one: to paraphrase Pascal, qui fait l’homme, fait le singe [he who acts the man, acts the ape].

—Giorgio Agamben, Man and Animal

[It is] then, not just about animals. It concerns whether or not we can conceive of ethical relationships beyond either continuism or separatism, beyond identity politics or abyssal alterity.

—Kelly Oliver, Animal Lessons

I owe a deep debt of gratitude to the authors of the four provocative and challenging papers on HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language, not only for their thoughtful consideration of my work, but for pinpointing and interrogating an uncertain “failure” in my text, namely the absence of the animal as such. David Wood asks if it would be unfair to characterize HumAnimal as a work of “anthropocentric posthumanism.” Ellen Armour, too, wonders about animals and where they figure in my project. She suggests that HumAnimal doesn’t “quite cross the putative line between humans and animals as such,” but she immediately and generously qualifies the observation as a “good thing, a productive thing.” Rebecca Tuvel, on the other hand, worries that in following Agamben, I appear to uphold “the binary logic that posits animals in opposition to humans because they lack language.” Animals, she suggests, “do seem to communicate with us in important ways, ways that are worth hearing.” These astute comments undoubtedly hit the mark; HumAnimal has nothing to say about animals as such, and despite the lure of the title, there is nary a squeak nor a snout that scuttles between the covers.

Rather than explain or defend this absence, let me turn to the title of this response: Why a philosophical anthropology rather than a zoology of animals? Obviously, there is a paradox inherent in calling for an anthropology of autozoōn, instead of a philosophical zoology. The latter would perhaps entail theories of evolution and animal behavior, research areas better left to natural scientists than to philosophers and critical thinkers. The problem with zoology is the way in which the philosophical question is supplanted by biological fact. An anthropology of animals on the other hand, would mean that we focus on the question of what it means to be something. In other words, my sense is that the question of the animal in philosophy can only be raised as a question of human propriety. To lose sight of the fraught co-implication of human propriety and animal alterity is to lose sight of the contribution that philosophy can make to hum(an)animal studies. Thus, where the animal is concerned what we must think is not merely whether the animal has language, whether we are in some kind of biological or social continuity with it, or whether between the animal and human is a condition of implacable alterity, a gulf that cannot be breached. We must also think the kind of necessity charged by the animal as such for thought or for any thinking to take place, and for any interrogation of (human) being. In other words, to follow Derrida in his deconstruction of the animal as such, the animal that is only a word, (l’animot) an abstraction that refers to nothing and everything, an idea of nonhuman life predicated on the ideal of man, must we not abandon, once and for all, the natural attitude toward animals? Must we not begin with the acknowledgment that the animal as such cannot be spoken of, that animals as such do not exist, but what exists is the signifier “animal” as the necessary correlative to any thought, construction or deconstruction of human-being? And that now in our current epoch of posthumanism, the strategic concept of “the natural animal” serves as an inconceivable ideal directing our ethics and our politics? Thus, I suggest that what we must contend with today, what must be encountered not once and for all but repeatedly, is the logical non sequitur that confronts us; that is...