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  • Writing Animals
  • David Brooks (bio)

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There are many forms of "animal" writing—one might write of farming animals, or of hunting them, one might taxonomize, or write a history of our relations with them, or of our representations of them, etc. I am writing of writing, sympathetically, in advocacy, in the joint understandings that we have no dominion—they are not for our use—and that their rights to life, and to maximization of the quality of that life, are much as we conceive our own. Writing enters a new place under such beliefs. In a sense it has to wrench itself away from itself. I want to write, with that new place in mind, of writing as a means by which we might approach that place.

But there are problems. Even the word animal itself is a problem. There is no such thing, Jacques Derrida says, as "animal," let alone "the Animal," unless the latter be taken as a conceptual construct, much as we might speak of "the Republic," "the Infinite," etc. "Animal" and "the Animal," Derrida says, are lumpen terms, a form of intellectual violence.1 There are only cat, dog, giraffe, cicada, kangaroo, rat, ant, etc. If we speak of animals, then it should be of the specific animals to which we refer. The term animal, cum Martin Heidegger, who devotes much of Being and Time to this project, is a concept, a construction, in order to define (and keep cat, dog, cicada, etc., from) the human, largely by listing what the "human" is not.

So perhaps the term animal, in a piece such as this, can be used only under erasure. The author, too, is an animal. One of the first things we should do, when we contemplate "writing (the) animal," and after acknowledging the intellectual violence involved, is acknowledge that we are human animals proposing to write about nonhuman animals.

But there are challenges even here. Were we to follow Derrida's lead, for example, and, resisting the violence of "animal," use instead [End Page 71] the names of all the animals to which we refer, then when we wished to refer to that realm that we have in the past called "animals," we would have to compile so vast a list we would in effect silence ourselves before the sheer weight of it. Yet nonhuman animals are voiceless without us. Silence ourselves we cannot. It is vital that we perform this work of writing animals. The "intellectual violence" of imposing an umbrella term upon the vast array of creatures upon which we have hitherto imposed that term, moreover, extends to many of those creatures themselves, in that cat, dog, rat, cicada are also umbrella terms. There are many species of cat, of dog, of cicada, and, of and within these species, countless individuals.

Am I balking at the terms animal, cat, dog, etc., or am I balking at language itself, one of the central features of which, surely, is just such generalization, and the way it makes the "world" malleable, portable, articulable? But language is also the product of its culture, is deeply imbued with that culture, and is one of the principal, if not the principal, means of transmitting that culture. And the vast proportion of human cultures—the cultures of human animals—have since their inception been dependent upon an exploitation and suffering of nonhuman animals reinforced by assumptions of human dominion. The languages of these cultures are deeply imbued with these assumptions and a vast array of mechanisms that have been generated by and sustain these assumptions. From an animal(ist) perspective, they've become something of a hostile medium. But it is also, of course, a necessary and unavoidable medium. One of the aspects of writing nonhuman animals is that it involves one, inevitably, in a long and demanding process of undoing (dismantling, sidestepping, avoidance, creation of new pathways). One of the greatest challenges of this process is to ensure that it does not so disrupt one's communication that one confuses, alienates, or otherwise loses the interest of the very audience one wishes to address. The writer of animals walks a tightrope.

Nonhuman animals have been effaced...

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