Play, Laugh, Love: Cynthia Willett’s Challenge to Philosophy

It is an honor to respond to Cynthia Willett’s work, which has been an inspiration for me personally as well as a crucial corrective to the biases and blind spots of Western philosophy. Reading her entails reviewing some of the most basic features of one’s life: the place you call home, the people you live with, your mother or primary caregiver, the words you utter, the other animals you love or ignore, and local conditions for justice, for play, for laughter, and for art. Her four major texts, all of them ethical, confront irony, motherhood, social justice, and animals. Because it would be impossible to deal comprehensively with the ways in which Willett has challenged and strategically sabotaged philosophy, my remarks here will focus on her most recent book, Interspecies Ethics, which expands several aspects of her early work on irony and laughter and her groundbreaking research on affect in Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities.

Interspecies Ethics is a brave and joyful investigation into the possibilities for camaraderie and justice among and between animal species. The book is moving in its descriptions of animal behaviors and sharp in its critique of philosophy’s implication in the chasm between human beings and other animals. Willett’s text is also ingenious in its performative aspects. She devotes much of her attention to the comic and to laughter, in spite of the grave subject matter she tackles and a final chapter devoted to J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. She not only enjoins us to consider other animals’ capacities for laughter and humor, she tells jokes. Her first chapter, “Can the Animal Subaltern Laugh?” (co-written with her sister) revolves around a Colbert Report episode relating to monkeys and ends with the phrase “ jello and porn” (probably the first-ever invocation of these terms, together, in a philosophical text). Willett’s humor recalibrates the expectations we have for philosophical prose and expands the resources we might use when philosophizing. Additionally, in laughing along with Willett, we are already exhibiting our animal natures. As she writes, “Waves of laughter lower defenses and mock the borders of subjects and groups, exposing these borders as more porous than they might have been thought” (Willett 2014, 79). In the spirit of forging a community of the laughing, Willett begins her thinking about animals not from the perspective of pity, shame, or horror at what we do to them, but from a celebratory glee in animal life.

In this essay, I will stress a few of the themes running through Willett’s work and pose three questions for further discussion. These relate, in order, to interspecies contact, playgrounds, and to her reading of Disgrace.

Contact Ethics

Willett is concerned with the world we share with other animals, with our common lots and the blurred edges of our differing bodies and habitats. Her book invites an awareness of the tragic fates of so many animals, but also the ridiculous, comical, and joyous aspects of our overlapping animal natures. Her emphases fall on playfulness, laughter, and musicality—traits she observes across animal species and that challenge human exceptionalism. Interspecies Ethics continues Willett’s ongoing project of reimagining the conditions for ethical life. Rather than an ethics based in infinite responsibility, one premised on sympathy and the recognition of mutual suffering, or an ethics rooted in the internalization of a universal law, Willett envisions an ethics grounded in “call and response,” which she describes as “discourse ethics across species” (Willett 2014, 27). For her, “discourse” means an initial, preverbal, rhythmic participation in the life of another creature. This is a far cry from the rational discourse ethics associated with Habermas. Instead, she sees call and response ethics as a tentative, playful exchange that challenges accounts of language, reason, and rationality. It also corrects Levinasian response or alterity ethics by reminding us that “responding to alterity is not [equivalent to] living with those other creatures” (Willett 2014, 9). In a way, Willett’s vision of ethics entails normalizing and extending the Levinasian face to face encounter to see what happens when we face...