ANGEL AK I

journal of the theoretical humanities volume 16 number 2 june 2011

he diverse aims of contemporary scholarship that calls itself animal studies or posthumanism renders inoperable any universally accepted definition of these fields. Generally speaking, however, scholars who work in these areas direct our attention to the permeable boundary that separates human from animal, or more forcefully, urge us to avow the human animality that we have historically denied. Such arguments are certainly not altogether novel coming more than 150 years after the publication of Darwins On the Origin of Species. That 39 percent of Americans currently reject the theory of evolution, however, suggests that blindness to human animality shows little abatement, thus underscoring the necessity of both scholarly and activist work that seeks to challenge the humanist ideologies that fuel such disavowals.1 Of course, posthumanist scholarship goes well beyond reaffirming Darwinian monogenesis. More urgently, it embraces a conception of the human that refuses to define itself in violent opposition to the nonhuman. Such work thus emphasizes the vulnerability that humans share with animals: our exposure to others that makes all living beings available to both hospitality and violence. While these goals are certainly worthy, I aim to put pressure on precisely what it means to affirm or avow animality. Can a posthumanist ethics or politics proceed by means of simply reversing humanisms disavowal of the animal? Can animality be fully avowed? Similar to past posts (poststructuralism, postmodernism, postfeminism, postracism, postmarxism, and so on), the language of posthumanism promises a temporal shift or turn, if not a complete rupture, ` -vis the legacy of humanism. Yet what vis-a exactly does it mean to leave humanism behind?

christopher peterson THE POSTHUMANISM TO COME

To what extent do the ghosts of posts past haunt this latest claim of temporal succession? Indeed, each of the aforementioned -isms has not surprisingly managed to survive beyond premature announcements of its death. That past posts continue to manifest the seemingly ineradicable traces of the -isms from which they claim to have broken free should caution us against acquiescing to a rhetoric of decisive ruptures and epistemological break[s] that are inevitably reinscribed in an old cloth that must continually, interminably be undone.2 This warning, issued from Derrida in the early 1970s, has generally been either forgotten or ignored by much recent posthumanist scholarship. Instead, such scholarship operates

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/1 1/020127^15 201 1 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2011.591592

127

posthumanism to come
according to a logic of dialectical reversal that claims too much for its capacity to move beyond humanism. To be sure, not all scholarship focused on the topic of human/animal relations identifies with the term posthumanism. Donna Haraway, whom many would consider one of posthumanisms founders, asserts in When Species Meet that she is not a posthumanist. She continues: I am who I become with companion species, who and which make a mess out of the categories in the making of kin and kind.3 The almost biblical tautology invoked by the phrase I am who I become implies an agnostic approach to the question of who we are becoming in our unceasing transformability. By contrast, the assertion that humanism can be decisively left behind ironically subscribes to a basic humanist assumption with regard to volition and agency, as if the end of humanism might be subject to human control, as if we bear the capacity to erase the traces of humanism from either the present or an imagined future after which posthumanism will have secured an inviolable institutional presence. As Derrida observes in The Animal that Therefore I Am, every ostensibly erased trace can leave a trace of its erasure: It is inherent to a trace that it is always being erased and always capable of being erased, even though its full and final effacement remains beyond human control.4 While Derridas argument is concerned primarily with our human incapacity to erase the marks of prior linguistic usages, the force of iterability undermines all claims to historical rupture, thus rendering untenable any effort to institutionalize posthumanism such that it could legitimately claim to have fully divorced itself from humanism. As Peggy Kamuf observes, there is no institution of any sort, and first of all no institution of meaningful signs . . . without iterability. Iterability is what we mean by institution and the reason we can mean anything at all.5 Whereas institutionalization is often taken to imply stabilization, Kamuf shows that whatever we seek to institute must itself be repeatedly performed and re-instituted such that the apparently stabilized forms [it] may assume in the present remain open to the transformations of a future (8, 4). Focusing on the institution of literature within the modern research university, Kamuf argues that the separation and division of literature from its others bears the very mark of division as a kind of surplus that belongs on neither side of the division it marks (8). Just as the institutional status [of literature] would never be fully assured or self-evident because, under the name of literature, it is this divisionality, posthumanism cannot stabilize itself without claiming a doubtful capacity to efface the mark of separation by which it disassociates itself from humanism. The following reflections aim to identify several related themes that regularly appear in posthumanist scholarship but which have not been theorized sufficiently, including the rhetoric of temporal and historical rupture, the logic of dialectical reversal, the effacement of human/ animal difference, and above all the critical ascendancy of the term posthumanism itself. To what extent does this watchwords well-worn prefix obscure an urgent and worthwhile ethicopolitical project under the historical weight of its own slogan? As we learn from the biblical book of Genesis, the human comes to know itself precisely thorough the power of naming. Indeed, the Adamic act of naming authorizes humans to assert their mastery over a heterogeneous group of beings who are nonetheless given the general name of animal. This pretention to selfknowledge, together with the homogenizing force it wields over all that is nonhuman, resurfaces at a later historical moment of arguably equal import: Carl Linnaeuss modern taxonomic system that both narrowed the gap between humans and animals by locating the former in the same genus as apes, and simultaneously repeated the gesture of human exceptionalism by designating the human nosce te ipsum, know thyself (which Linnaeus later shortened to Homo sapiens). As Giorgio Agamben observes, the solipsistic logic of this appellation implies that man has no specific identity other than the ability to recognize himself . . . Man is the animal that must recognize itself as human to be human.6 In other words, the human is human only insofar as it calls itself human. If one of the aims of posthumanism is to trouble such narcissistic self-reflection,

128

peterson
to render the face of the human unknowable and unrecognizable, then to what extent does the human that re-names itself posthuman do so in order to lay claim once again to a dubious self-knowledge? The rhetoric of posthumanism, moreover, implies a progressive narrative that ironically mirrors the Enlightenment principles of perfectibility that it would oppose. Against this regrettable alliance, I argue that the advent of the posthuman always remains to come. I draw this principle of posthumanisms necessarily deferred completion from Derridas notion of the democracy to come, which Derrida insists does not mean a future democracy that will one day be present.7 Just as democracy must always remain insufficient a principle that is especially crucial to remember in those moments when it seems to present itself as having fully arrived the posthuman must infinitely postdate its arrival in any present. The moniker of posthumanism, by contrast, presumes that the end of humanism has either already arrived or that its arrival is only a matter of time. On the contrary, the non-arrival of the posthuman is a matter of time in an entirely different sense. Indeed, it is a matter of what Martin Ha gglund characterizes (following Derrida) as the undecidable coming of time, the indeterminable and incalculable future that cannot repose in any present, but must remain both infinitely perfectible and infinitely corruptible.8 (100). In addition to redressing the dehumanization of social and political others, recuperating the animal serves a crucial institutional function; that is, it promises to curb the exhaustion of the humanities, which has resulted from a rehashing of specific theories that take on a dogmatic and predictable quality (161). Yet Rohmans animal-centered approach is itself quite predictable in its reliance on a logic of inversion whereby the animal assumes its position alongside previously valorized identity categories such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and ethnicity. On Rohmans account, moreover, posthumanism owes its institutional advent more to the perennial search for a new critical paradigm than to the political or ethical exigencies that ought to form the principal justification for humanisms displacement. Her approach thus reduces the animal to a fetish designed to cover over a sense of human lack and insufficiency, an allegorical mascot to reinvigorate a humanities that is perceived to be depleted. It might seem odd to diagnose this aim to reinvigorate the humanities as fetishistic. After all, the fetish in Freudian terms is predicated on a logic of disavowal, whereas the force of Rohmans argument, as with much posthumanist scholarship, is animated by an effort to avow animality.10 Yet it is precisely in opposing the operations of avowal and disavowal that the call to affirm animality risks replicating the violence it aims to avoid. That marginalizing the human reinscribes the human/animal opposition is altogether unsurprising given its emphasis on reversal rather than on displacement. The latter requires what Kamuf characterizes (referring to deconstructive strategies more generally) as a double gesture of inscribing and erasing that effaces the historical epoch of metaphysics . . . in a manner that does not render it illegible.11 If the metaphysics of presence is conditioned by rance, multiple disavowals (of writing, diffe absence, finitude, spectrality, animality, and so on), we cannot simply convert this disavowal to an avowal, for that would presuppose a rigorous distinction between avowing/disavowing; rather, deconstruction must both register and repudiate philosophys archive according to a movement whereby we do not simply renounce our

a weaker disavowal
For many posthumanist scholars, the promise of reducing violence directed both toward nonhuman animals and toward dehumanized social and political others depends on severing our allegiance to humanism. In Stalking the Subject, for instance, Carrie Rohman identifies the mechanisms of disavowal within modernist racist and imperialist ideologies that displaced animality onto marginalized groups, whether they be Jews, blacks, women, or the poor.9 In response, Rohman champions texts that radically invert the traditional speciesist hierarchy by privileging . . . the animal and marginaliz[ing] the conventional human

129

posthumanism to come
membership in the very metaphysical tradition to which we do not fully belong but in which we inevitably participate. To characterize such participation without belonging, Kamuf proffers a phrase whose awkwardness she readily (dare we say) avows: the disavowal of disavowal (9). To reduce confusion and to signal the weaker power of the belated disavowal, we might write it as the (dis)avowal of disavowal. This weaker (dis)avowal, this avowal that avows its own fragility, aims to mitigate the movement of negation whose traces cannot be fully eradicated from the most apparently unqualified affirmation. This inherent corruptibility of any avowal is a necessary corollary of Freuds observation that every disavowal is subject to failure. In An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Freud notes that when the ego . . . seeks to disavow a portion of the real external world . . . its success is never complete and unqualified. The outcome always results in two contrary attitudes, of which the defeated weaker one, no less than the other, leads to psychical complications.12 The mechanisms of registration and repudiation thus operate according to an agency whose power lies beyond the scope of human volition. The success of any disavowal is never assured. If we accept Freuds view, then is it not also true that the success of every avowal is likewise never finally certain? This would mean that we can no more affirm animality wholly than we can deny it, that the traces of both the affirmation and the refusal haunt one another from within. To argue otherwise is to presume that the divided subject might somehow be made whole, that the contrary attitudes produced by means of disavowal might be finally reconciled in favor of an unequivocal affirmation of animality. I want to suggest that this incapacity to reverse the disavowal of animality stems largely from what Freud describes as the narcissism of minor differences, by which he observes that it is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility between them.13 Freud initially situated this form of narcissism in the context of sexual difference in order to explain male hostility toward women. Later he expanded his theory to consider racial, ethnic, and nationalist tensions that arise between communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and ridiculing one another.14 Given that humans and chimpanzees share 96 percent of the same DNA, one could certainly further extend Freuds theory to explore human aggressivity and violence toward nonhuman animals.15 That is to say, it is precisely the similitude between humans and apes that humans so often seek to deny. It might be objected that the differences between humans and some nonhuman animals are simply too great to afford any useful analysis in terms of the narcissism of minor differences. Yet the human obsession with documenting the numerous deficiencies that supposedly plague the lives of animals cannot fail to register even if it ultimately disavows the chiasmus between human and animal. After all, humans do not typically devote their energy to denying stones the capacity for language, reason, and sentience precisely because the dissimilarity of such inanimate objects from humans seems incontrovertible. The assertion of animal lack, in other words, presupposes an acknowledgement of transspecies similarity, no matter how minimal, that is nonetheless denied.16 If the absolute separation of human from animal seeks to assert human superiority, it also has the consequence of exacerbating the animals menacing alterity. In this regard, the human tendency toward anthropomorphism emerges as a compromise formation that works to diminish this threat, even as it guards against any complete collapse of the human/animal distinction. After all, the anthropomorphic animal is by definition not fully animal but also not quite human. Anthropomorphism thus functions as a fetish that produces the animal as both the same and different. Despite its cultural ubiquity, anthropomorphism has historically been scorned by the scientific community in particular as na ve and counterproductive to the aims of an ostensibly neutral and objective endeavor. As Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman observe, anthropomorphism is often seen as a mark of childishness and feeblemindedness that is incompatible with modern science.17 However, the taboo

130

peterson
on anthropomorphism appears to prescribe a relation to animal alterity that would fully eradicate human narcissism. It presumes that the animal is absolutely other, as Levinas might put it, and therefore not simply another (inferior) version of the human. Certainly the erasure of animal alterity ought to be resisted. Yet is there any relation to animal alterity that is not complicit, as least minimally, in seeking to reduce this otherness to the human, even if such appropriation ultimately fails? Such complicity is thoroughly disavowed when Jonathan Burt declares that, for animal studies to move forward . . . we need to bring the animal center stage as the main focus of study, sidestepping the issue of the humananimal boundary, and set this study within the overarching context of human animal relations not the overarching context of theorizing about humans.18 Is the only alternative to a na ve anthropomorphism an equally specious anthropomorphobia that insists on the animals absolute difference? How exactly can we whoever or whatever we are sidestep the human/animal boundary? Humans have historically secured this boundary by ascribing to themselves a number of capacities that nonhumans supposedly lack, among these: sentience, reason, language, tool use, mourning, deception, imagination, and knowledge of mortality. One might seek to demonstrate that animals do indeed possess such capabilities, a task that would seem to satisfy Burts proposal to cease theorizing about humans. Indeed, ethologists have already done much to cast doubt on many long-standing humanist presumptions with regard to what animals can or cannot do.19 The merits of demonstrating that language is not exclusively human, or that animals are aware of their impending death, are not to be dismissed. Yet to extend such capacities to nonhuman animals is still to theorize about animals from a human perspective, which means that we can never fully avoid theorizing about humans. Moreover, the extension of these capacities to the nonhuman presumes that the given faculties given in both senses as known and bestowed upon are unproblematically human. It presupposes, in other words, that we know and identify such capabilities as originally ours in order to give them to animals. Consider, for instance, the claim that animals are ignorant of their mortality. As Heidegger famously declared, only man dies. The animal perishes.20 To the extent that the animal is poor in world, occupying a liminal position between the animate and the inanimate, the sentient and the insentient, the animal possesses no knowledge of death as death. Heidegger thus echoed Rousseaus assertion that an animal will never know what it is to die because death lies beyond its imaginative capacities.21 For Rousseau, the animal is riveted to an eternal present and therefore cannot anticipate any future. One could challenge such unsupported generalizations about animal being by providing evidence that animals possess both a temporal sense and an awareness of death irreducible to an instinctual revolt of the organism but not a revolt of the soul that the fictional Thomas OHearne ascribes to animals in Coetzees The Lives of Animals (63). To engage such arguments on their own terms, however, is already to grant humans a knowledge of finitude against its presumptive absence among animals. It might seem counterintuitive or downright absurd to claim that humans lack knowledge of their own mortality. Yet is this not precisely what Freud observed when he asserted that at bottom no one believes in his own death . . . Every one of us is convinced of his own immortality?22 Echoing Freud, Zygmunt Bauman calls attention to the remarkable achievement by which we live as if we were not going to die.23 Insofar as animality and finitude are deeply imbricated, we deny our animality, in part, in order to imagine ourselves as immortal. As Giorgio Agamben suggests, the human has historically been conceived as the articulation and conjunction of a body and a soul . . . of a natural (or animal) element and a supernatural or social or divine element.24 This belief in humanitys partial divinity is not easily relinquished. To avow our animality would be to pronounce without reservation our vulnerability and exposure to mortality, to affirm unconditionally the unavoidable certainty of human finitude to which we nevertheless always remain partially blind.

131

posthumanism to come
In speaking of something like a conditional avowal, I might appear to contradict Derridas notion of an unconditional hospitality. Yet this latter formulation is misconstrued when read as calling for a wholly nonviolent relation to alterity. While Derrida does indeed argue that an originary yes conditions any relation to the other, he also insists that this affirmation lets itself be haunted by an intrinsic threat that can transform any yes into a no.25 In this regard, carnivorism, no less than vegetarianism, would be conditioned by such an originary exposure and openness to alterity. I must say yes to the animal even if I choose to eat it. As Derrida observes:
an unconditional hospitality is, to be sure, practically impossible to live . . . But without at least the thought of this pure and unconditional hospitality, of hospitality itself, we would have no concept of hospitality in general and would not even be able to determine any rules for conditional hospitality. (PTT 129)

We must therefore re-inscribe the unconditional into certain conditions (130). This is why Derrida describes the yes as inherently double: an originary yes that opens any relation to alterity, even a violent one, and a subsequent yes that he compares to the signature that follows ones name on an identification card, and which takes on the sense of a yes, of an ethical engagement to the other (UG 94). As Ha gglund puts it, the unconditional yes . . . marks the opening of an unpredictable future that one will have to negotiate, without an affirmative or negative response being given in advance (97). Ha gglund thus foregrounds Derridas insistence that ethical decisions derive from a determination of what constitutes the lesser violence rather than from a choice between violence and nonviolence. Derrida employs the phrase lesser violence only briefly in an essay on Levinas that challenges his aspirations to ethical purity.26 For Derrida, no relation to alterity is devoid of violence. Despite Levinass notion that ethics requires a relation to an absolute other, an other who escapes the economy of the same, Derrida demonstrates that the absolute other

amounts to an other who bears no relationship to alterity, which means that the absolute other is nothing other, as it were, than the same. Derrida thus displaces the opposition between violence and nonviolence by showing that ethical decisions are made in view of choosing the lesser violence, even though what ultimately constitutes the lesser violence is never entirely knowable and thus always available to revision and reevaluation.27 In other words, despite our best intentions, we cannot know either now or in the future whether what we perceive as the lesser violence will have turned out to be the lesser or the worse violence. Indeed, the phrase will have turned out misleadingly imagines a future moment that would resolve such a question once and for all; the future present, no less than the present present, is not immune to the temporality that opens every decision to an infinite number of future judgments that may alter our interpretation of whether a given act has resulted in greater or lesser violence. To claim that humans can avow the animal without reservation is thus to endow human consciousness with a self-mastery and agency that denies the power of our non-power, our notbeing-able that Derrida locates at the heart of human being. Beyond its affirmation of animal suffering, Benthams rejection of speech and reason as the reigning criterion that decides our ethical actions toward animals interests Derrida precisely because it stresses a non-activity, indeed, a weak power: Can they suffer? amounts to asking can they not be able? (AIA 28).28 The intransitive form of suffer in Derridas citation of Bentham does not describe a willful agency; rather, suffering happens. Drawing upon this Derridean insight, Leonard Lawlor asserts that humans and animals are composed of one force . . . that does not have the ability or the force to keep the others out.29 This weak force thus does not so much grant animals permission to board the ark in order to repopulate a postdiluvian humanism as it avows that we are not able to exclude them. The title of Lawlors book, This is Not Sufficient, succinctly captures this sense of human deficiency with regard to our responsibility toward nonhuman

132

peterson
animals. This book that announces itself as insufficient, as unable to render a prescriptive account of how humans ought to act toward animals, does so not by displaying an air of false humility but by responsibly affirming that no affirmation can be responsible enough. In lieu of a prescription that would cure our human disavowal of animality, Lawlor offers what he describes as a recipe that says yes to animal others (and to the animals that we are) even as this hospitality cannot fully distinguish itself from the violence of negation. Despite deriving this weak force from Derridas notion of not-being-able, Lawlor insists on an ethics of unconditional, unlimited hospitality that risks replicating the logic of the strong force he claims to eschew. Indeed, he urges us to make the passive active. Let the others in their singularity in . . . Then, up the ante on this weak force, make it unconditional, which amounts to letting every single other in (109; my emphasis). Yet how can a weak force enforce its unconditionality, when the unconditional is defined as precisely the unenforceable, the imprescriptible? How can we make something unconditional when the unconditional cannot be made to say either yes or no to whatever arrives? My point, however, is not simply that the unconditional cannot be enforced, but that it does not exist in any absolute purity. Derridas observation that pure unconditionality is impossible to live means that our weak power, our lesser disavowal, not only cannot keep animal others out but equally cannot keep animals in, that is, affirm a hospitality of unlimited scope. All forms of belonging no matter how open and hospitable they are toward others inevitably produce beasts (both human and nonhuman) whose exclusion functions at cross purposes with our apparent desire for inclusivity and nonviolence. To grasp fully this fundamental logic of exclusion, we must come to terms with what Derrida describes in Rogues as the autoimmunitary character of democracy, according to which the fulfillment of democracys promise is always deferred. Although democracy is built on the seeming ideals of freedom and equality, these principles actually conflict with one another. Whereas freedom is unconditional and immeasurable, equality is conditional and measurable. Democracy claims to be all inclusive, but it always produces rogues, a term which bears certain bestial connotations. Democracy thus attacks itself from within by claiming to remain open to the incalculable freedom of the people on the one hand, but insisting that everyone must be equally free on the other. Despite its supposedly limitless hospitality, democracy must therefore place conditions on freedom, which means that it disavows its foundational logic of exclusion. Yet not only is democratic freedom conditioned by the principle of equality, but democracy necessarily circumscribes its applicability to those demos it determines as belonging to a definable, and therefore limited, population. Even if a democracy decides to extend the right to vote to immigrants, for example, it nonetheless continues to exclude a whole world of singularities who call out in suffering for a legitimately infinite extension of what are called human rights.30 To extend voting rights to immigrants is still not to include everyone. A more inclusive democracy is still not and cannot be all inclusive insofar as it cannot eradicate the border that secures the included against the excluded. Rogues are thus not an accidental occurrence that befalls an otherwise all-inclusive democracy, but rather are a measure of its internal conflict between freedom and equality. Democracy authorizes the production of animal others (of different or the same species, of different or the same skin colors, of different or the same social classes, and so on). Far from naming a political ideal, democracy remains the only system that welcomes in itself, in its very concept, the expression of autoimmunity called the right to self-critique and perfectibility (86). As Ha gglund observes, however, perfectibility is identical to corruptibility and undercuts the regulative Idea of final perfection (169; original emphasis). The impossibility of achieving a perfect democracy is thus not to be lamented precisely because its absence allows for change and transformation. Insofar as posthumanism is invested in the democratic mission of expanding equality, it betrays its own autoimmunity. One of the most

133

posthumanism to come
common anxieties plaguing contemporary political and philosophical projects that take the value of nonhuman animals seriously is the irresolvable question of where to draw the line. That is, which animals are deserving of rights and ethical treatment and which are not. Whereas the Great Ape Project, for instance, seeks to extend to apes the right to life, individual liberty, and the prohibition on torture precisely because apes are our closest nonhuman relatives, others argue that the line should correspond with the capacity for sentience.31 One can go further and claim a doubtful ethical purity that says yes to all others, that admits no lines or exclusions. This is dubious because it subscribes to an unlimited, and thus unsupportable, hospitality that disavows its own violent practices. If, as I noted above, a carnivore must say yes to the animal others that he or she nonetheless eats, it is also true that a vegetarian who says yes to some animals (by not eating them), might also say no to other animals. (One thinks of Elizabeth Costellos admission in The Lives of Animals that she wears leather boots despite her unwavering vegetarianism.) Yet the violence of appropriation is not reducible to such seeming failures to live up to an absolute prohibition on the consumption of nonhuman animals. When Derrida remarks that vegetarians, too, partake, of animals, even of men, he in no way means to dismiss vegetarian practices.32 His point rather is that carnivorism is irreducible to the physical consumption of animals. Violence takes many forms, from the most extreme acts of killing and mutilation to less theatrical modes of excluding both human and nonhuman animals, especially those seemingly innocuous practices of social cohesion and belonging whose violence should concern us especially because it is so seldom acknowledged. That our relations to alterity always betray a minimal violence is neither to acquiesce to the suffering of others nor to stubbornly maintain the human/animal opposition, an error for which Matthew Calarco, seemingly with the aim of outflanking deconstruction, takes Derrida to task. Troubled by Derridas assertion that the aim of deconstruction lies not in effacing the limit [between human and animal], but in multiplying its figures, in complicating, thickening, delinearizing, folding, and dividing the line precisely by making it increase and multiply, Calarco describes this recognition of irreducible difference as dogmatic and puzzling (AIA 29).33 Yet Derrida is simply rehearsing the basic deconstructive point that a line is never singular, that what we call the line can always be divided within itself. When he refers to this line as an abyssal rupture, moreover, this does not suggest so much a horizontal expansion of the distance between human and animal as it does a bottomless accretion of lines, folding in on and infinitely divisible within themselves. Once the line has been divided within itself, moreover, this line is no longer a line, and thus the domains on either side that the line sought to demarcate are no longer pure. Indeed, Derrida remarks that these relations [between humans and animals] are at once intertwined and abyssal, and they can never be totally objectified. They do not leave room for any simple exteriority of one term with respect to the other (AIA 31; my emphasis). Hence, there never was one line between human and animal, a point that Calarco obscures when he asserts that Derrida advocates a simple (or even a highly refined) binary distinction between human and animal, thus rather slyly (and falsely) attributing to Derrida a desire to maintain their oppositional relation (143; my emphasis). This line of thought (or thought of the line) leads to the conclusion that humans could simply let the humananimal distinction go (149; original emphasis).34 Calarco presents this solution as a way out of the false opposition that Derrida supposedly constructs between conventional, binaristic thinking on the one hand, and biological continuism on the other (149). It remains entirely unclear, however, how letting the humananimal distinction go could not lead to either biological continuism or to something rather similar to (if not wholly synonymous with) the multiplication of differences advocated by deconstruction. When Derrida draws our attention to the divisibility of any line, he clearly intends to let the human animal distinction go, understood as the singular line that humanism has historically drawn between human and animal. Despite his

134

peterson
claims to the contrary, Calarco, like Derrida, also does not appear to advocate the effacement of all differences. He remarks that
even if one agrees with Derrida that the task for thought is to attend to differences that have been overlooked and hidden by philosophical discourse, this does not mean that every difference and distinction that guides common sense and philosophy should be maintained and refined. (149; original emphasis)

itself the subject of the signifier (cited in Derrida, AIA 135). Not content with demonstrating that nonhuman animals do indeed possess the ability to cover their tracks, Derrida asks
by what right could one concede that power to the human, to the subject of the signifier? . . . Is it necessary to recall that every erased trace . . . can leave a trace of its erasure whose symptom . . . will always be capable of ensuring its return? And is it necessary, above all, to remind a psychoanalyst of that? (13536)

What about Derridas affirmation of animal suffering? His refusal to deny animals the capacity for language and mourning? His rejection of the Cartesian reduction of the animal to the status of reactive automaton? As Calarcos own extensive (and uncommonly precise) exegesis of Derrida demonstrates, the latter makes it abundantly clear that these conventional markers of difference are dubious at best. Calarco thus seems to arrive at a set of conclusions with regard to human/animal differences that are difficult to distinguish from those of Derrida. Where he does depart most clearly from Derrida, however, can be detected precisely in the rhetoric of letting go, which betrays a profoundly humanist conceit with regard to volition and agency, as if the answer to our conflicted and discordant relation to nonhuman beings was right there in front of us all along, simply waiting to be discovered, as if humans bear the power to simply will these differences away. Notwithstanding Calarcos insistence on erasing distinctions, one cannot thus avoid detecting a certain analytical hair splitting that is symptomatic of contemporary political anxieties with regard to drawing lines. The point I am making is not that we should or should not draw lines, but that lines get drawn nonetheless, consciously or unconsciously, even and especially when we deliberately seek to efface them, such that we can never be entirely certain that our efforts will not themselves outline a new boundary that is equally in need of erasure. Indeed, Derrida diagnoses the belief in the capacity to efface ones traces as a philosophical dogmatism, one that manifests in Lacans dubious assertion that an animal cannot cover up its tracks, which would be tantamount to making

Derrida thus echoes Freuds claim that the success of any disavowal is never guaranteed; its traces can always return. In terms of human/ animal difference, we can never rest easy knowing that the eradication of any line (that is always already infinitely divisible within itself, that is not actually a line) will not be redrawn. Indeed, how can we know absolutely that the eradication is not finally a reinscription, one that leads to unforeseen violence and exclusions? Therein lies the autoimmunitary force of posthumanism, the irresolvable and insurmountable tension between hospitality and inhospitality, inclusion and exclusion, inscription and erasure. Posthumanism can and ought to work toward weakening these forces of negation, but it cannot for that matter ever claim to have vanquished them once and for all, nor can it assure itself that an act perceived as diminishing violence does not in fact consent to its escalation or transposition, its operation in unintended and unforeseeable ways.

tise of (post)humanism the be

Of posthumanisms many advocates, Cary Wolfe ranks among the most well known and scholarly active, editing the Posthumanities series at the University of Minnesota Press, and producing a wealth of scholarship that demonstrates no small debt to Derrida. Given this steady engagement with deconstructive thought, it is all the more surprising that Wolfe defines posthumanism in Animal Rites (2003) precisely by employing the vocabulary of rupture that Derrida eschews: Most of us remain humanists to the core, even as we claim for our work an epistemological break

135

posthumanism to come
with humanism itself.35 The reference to most of us is clearly not meant in this context to include the author himself; rather, the language here serves as an injunction to other scholars in the humanities to make the break with humanism that Wolfe has supposedly already made. That Wolfe views his work as operating on the far side of humanism is confirmed when he observes that his perspective on animal subjectivity might lead some to consign him to the lunatic fringe (1). What better way to mark ones split from tradition than by portraying it hyperbolically as a perceived break from reason? In What is Posthumanism? (2010), however, Wolfe adopts a more measured tone with regard to the question of historical departure, conceding that the point is not to reject humanism tout court indeed, there are many values and aspirations to admire in humanism but rather to show how those aspirations are undercut by the philosophical and ethical frameworks used to conceptualize them.36 For Wolfe, posthumanism comes both before and after humanism, before to the extent that it avows the humans indissoluble relation to its own embodiment and animality, both of which come into view as the evolutionary condition of possibility for the emergence of the human as such, and after insofar as it names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore (WIP 121, xv). This temporal disjunction accords ` -vis posthumanism a paradoxical temporality vis-a humanism, thus appearing to disrupt the narrative of historical rupture to which Wolfe subscribed in his earlier work. Yet despite appearing to reject the temporal division between humanism and posthumanism, this distinction gets reinscribed in the context of his painstaking efforts to distinguish between what he characterizes as humanist versus posthumanist approaches to posthumanism. In other words, it is no longer a matter of separating oneself from a humanist past as it is from a humanist present, or rather, from those whose current scholarly and political endeavors betray anachronistic humanist assumptions. In his critique of the Great Ape Project, for instance, Wolfe rightly observes that such a wellintended and long overdue project nonetheless problematically endows apes with rights only because they possess capacities that we possess, but in diminished form (AR 191, 192). The Great Ape Project thus urges us to protect apes from harm only because they are inferior versions of ourselves (AR 192). Wolfe traces a similar humanist logic in Martha Nussbaums capabilities model, which evaluates our ethical practices toward animals in terms of how they either facilitate or inhibit their flourishing, a flourishing that is based on a more or less empirical assessment of the capabilities, needs, characteristics, behaviors, and so on of the particular being in question (WIP 66). He describes such work as humanist posthumanism insofar as it outwardly expresses a posthumanist aim of taking the lives of nonhuman animals seriously yet internally clings to outmoded concepts and methodologies. If the designation of humanist posthumanism were not unwieldy enough, Wolfe proceeds to categorize a select group of theorists and philosophers into four general classifications: (1) Humanist Humanism; (2) Humanist Posthumanism; (3) Posthumanist Humanism; and (4) Posthumanist Posthumanism (WIP 125).37 Employing a Cartesian Coordinate Graph no less, Wolfe plots the names of these thinkers relative to humanism and posthumanism. In each case, the first term in the pair (plotted along the X axis) corresponds to a given theorys internal disciplinarity (or methodology) while the second (plotted along the Y axis) refers to its external relations to its larger environment, the extent to which it explicitly assumes responsibility for rethinking our relation to nonhuman animals (WIP 123; original emphasis). Not surprisingly are the theorists that Wolfe champions (Derrida, Haraway, Latour, Luhmann, Maturana, and Varela) placed in the category of Posthumanist Posthumanism, so that we are given to surmise that such practitioners (including, by implication, Wolfe) could claim the title of Posthumanist Posthumanist. This rhetorical accumulation of posts thus begins to mirror the teleological narrative that Wolfe identifies with

136

peterson
transhumanism, a discourse that he explicitly rejects insofar as it hinges on fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy derived from Enlightenment ideals of human perfectibility (WIP xv). Although he assures us that he does not aim to pursue a kind of more-posthumanistthan-thou sweepstakes, it nevertheless remains difficult not to see in this accretion of posts a form of one-upmanship that imagines posthumanism precisely within a narrative of increasing perfection (WIP 62). Most striking about the categorical couplings that Wolfe constructs are how they presume a certain internal purity, such that, for example, each term in the pair, humanist posthumanism, is presumed to be entirely identical to itself. An avowedly posthumanist project is deemed to fail only when its otherwise pure set of external relations are undermined by a faulty internal disciplinarity. Yet how can one assume that each member of this coupling is not already divided within itself? As Wolfe would have it, humanist posthumanism describes a project whose explicit avowal of animality is nevertheless disavowed on an internal, methodological level. This logic presumes, as I noted before, a doubtful capacity to distinguish with any absolute certainty an avowal from a disavowal. Humanist posthumanism, which is no more awkwardly rendered as a disavowed avowal, could never be entirely separable from posthumanist posthumanism, or an avowed avowal, an affirmation of animality that supposedly operates according to a methodology whose internal purity is equal only to that of its outward intentions. That there could be no end to the formulations made possible by the operations of division means that no matter how one might want to distinguish humanism from posthumanism, the mark of division, to paraphrase Kamuf, remains as a surplus that haunts the very domains that it divides but to which it does not precisely belong. Posthumanisms impossible institutionalization is further disavowed by the rhetorical shift from posthumanism to the posthumanities, a move clearly designed to facilitate a concrete institutionalization in the form of a series published by a university press.38 Describing the aims of this series, Wolfe asserts that the posthumanities foresees what the humanities will look like thirty years from now that is, when the humanities will have become the posthumanities.39 According to this formulation, the Posthumanities series foreshadows a future institutionalization that will take the form of a discipline rechristened and fully reimagined as the posthumanities. One can thereby trace a certain trajectory, mapped out in advance, that begins with the posthuman as trope, continues through its canonization as the guiding concept of an interdisciplinary field of study, and achieves its formal concretization as a division of research and teaching within a university to come. If all goes well, this narrative seems to suggest, the posthumanities will not simply take its place alongside previous minority studies, modes of inquiry such as race, class, gender, and sexuality whose legitimization has hinged on a similar logic of incremental institutionalization. On the contrary, Wolfes vision would force these areas of study to reckon with a much larger overhaul of the humanities as such. And yet, by what measure would we be able to judge the success of this institutional transformation? What messianic signs will herald its final arrival? Although Wolfe concedes the possibility that posthumanisms final institutional arrival may be subject to a deferral of thirty years, this arrival is no less presentist for all that it is delayed. Such scholarship is certainly forward looking, but what it ought to look toward is not an imaginary future in which its aims will have been instituted once and for all, but rather a future that will still take seriously the question of animal alterity, a question that Wolfe and many others are currently posing with great insight and urgency, yet whose continued power and relevance requires that it be repeatedly and unceasingly re-posed. The posthumanities will always remain to come. To claim, on the contrary, that the posthumanities has either already arrived or will finally arrive on some future day is to presume, as I indicated above, that the disavowal of animality which conditions the emergence of the human subject can be finally overcome; it presumes, that is, a certain Aufhebung of the human, a raising up of the human to a higher

137

posthumanism to come
level of meaning, even if it gains its significance by affirming our affinity with the so-called lower animals. One could certainly explain away this messianic narrative as nothing more than a marketing device. Yet this rhetoric goes a long way toward legitimizing posthumanism as a field of study that bears the capacity to efface any and all traces of its previous, humanist past. Wolfes effort to expose the residual humanism that informs certain philosophical and political interventions is both necessary and often on target. Yet these interrogations always take the form of a judgment in which others are found bearing the traces of an atavistic humanism that one would have hoped to have fully eradicated in oneself. In a long tise and detailed analysis of the French term be te, beast), Derrida suggests that the (from be accusation of folly, bad judgment, or stupidity that one levels against others
can always be mine, and not that of someone else . . . can always betray my fault, my failing, evil, or illness, the defect from which I suffer . . . I, myself, as philosopher, theorist or not, always run the risk of having tise Im talking to attribute to myself the be tement, I think about or that, dogmatically, be I recognize in others.40

tise This contagion or mimeticism of be makes it impossible to disentangle oneself fully from the offense that endures ones judgment, which means that the division that one might want to institute between humanism and post tise humanism can never be assured, that the be of humanism of which posthumanism does not want to find itself guilty, can always leave its traces, notwithstanding our all-too-human efforts to erase them (158). This posthumanism can te (beastly, violent, always prove to be just as be te stupid, lacking in judgment), or even more be tise it claims to correct. That the than the be traces of humanism remain is thus not fully attributable to a lack of philosophical or political insight on the part of scholars such as Nussbaum, a reflection of the incapacity, as it were, of the capabilities model to move fully beyond humanism. If this project is deemed unsuccessful, its failure is not reducible to methodological

error, to its inability to conjugate its external relations with its internal disciplinarity. Prior to any purported methodological success or failure, no posthumanist project worthy of this name (and my point is precisely that no scholarship or politics will ever be worthy enough to claim this title), could ever attain its final selfcompletion. There is, nor never will be, a politics and ethics that could legitimately call itself posthuman, only a politics and ethics that will have been more or (one hopes) less humanist, more or less violent in its treatment of both human and nonhuman others. What calls itself posthuman is thus not yet posthuman precisely because it claims to be posthuman, because it claims for itself either a present or a future whose unforeseeable iterations may prove either more or less peaceful, either more or less perfect, but never totally without violence, never without the possibility of corruption. Rather than attempt to articulate a positive definition of posthumanism that claims to know what posthumanism is, we might follow Derrida in his Letter to a Japanese Friend, where he reflects on the inadequacy of the term deconstruction, despite its having become the mot clef in the critical reception of his work. After carefully detailing what deconstruction is not, Derrida asserts that deconstruction takes place, it is an event that does not await the deliberation, consciousness, or organization of a subject, or even of modernity . . . What deconstruction is not? everything of course! What is deconstruction? nothing of course!41 To some extent, Wolfes suggestion that posthumanism is both before and after humanism echoes Derridas notion that deconstruction does not wait for its conscious deployment by a human subject. The posthuman is also the antehuman, the animality that precedes the historical elevation of the human above all other life forms. Yet whereas Derrida expresses both dissatisfaction with the term deconstruction and surprise with regard to the privileged space it has come to occupy in the reception of his work muting a number of equally (un)satisfactory terms such as writing, trace, supplement, specter, and so on Wolfes ever-more-labyrinthine refinements of posthumanism appear altogether content with the

138

peterson
critical dominance that the term bears in contemporary discussions on human/animal difference. How might the human otherwise come to unknow itself, permanently and without the comforts of naming and identity, as neither human nor posthuman, as altogether different and unidentifiable from what we imagine we are or continue to become?
11 Peggy Kamuf, Book of Addresses (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005) 14. 12 Sigmund Freud,An Outline of Psychoanalysis in The Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth,1973) 61. 13 Sigmund Freud, The Taboo of Virginity in The Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth,1973) 199. 14 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents in Sigmund Freud. Vol. 12: Civilization, Society , and Religion, trans. James Strachey (New Y ork: Penguin,1991) 305. 15 Stefan Lovgren, Chimps, Humans 96 Percent the Same, Gene Study Finds, National Geographic, available 5http://news.nationalgeo graphic.com/news/2005/08/0831050831chimpgenes. html4 (accessed 8 Feb. 2010). 16 The preoccupation with animal lack is thus not unlike the trauma produced by the male fetishists perception of female castration. The fetishist disavows both male/female sameness (their similarity to one another beyond genital dissimilarity) and male/female difference: the latter insofar as the fetish functions to replace the missing maternal phallus. 17 Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, eds., Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (New Y ork: Columbia UP, 2005) 3. 18 Jonathan Burt, Review of Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe, and Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of the Species, and Posthumanist Theory, Society and Animals 13.2 (2005) 168. 19 For provocative discussions of various animal capacities, see the Reflections by Marjorie Garber, Wendy Doniger, Peter Singer, and Barbara Smuts included in J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999) 73^106; see also Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, eds., The Great Ape Project: Equality beyond Humanity (New Y ork: St. Martins, 1993). 20 Martin Heidegger, The Thing in Poetry , Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New Y ork: Harper,1971) 178. 21 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, trans. Roger Masters and Judith

notes
1 Jon D. Miller et al., Public Acceptance of Evolution, Science 313 (11 Aug. 2006): 765^ 66. The rejection of evolution frequently hinges on a disavowal of human animality. Consider the recent emergence of Intelligent Design in the United States as an alternative both to Darwinian evolution and to Creationism. Intelligent Design allows for modifications to occur polygenetically, but it safeguards the borders of the human by continuing to deny natural selection. 2 Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (London: Continuum, 2004) 22. 3 When Species Meet Minnesota P, 2008) 19. (Minneapolis: U of

4 Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New Y ork: Fordham UP, 2008) 136. Henceforth cited in the text as AIA. 5 Peggy Kamuf, The Division of Literature, or the University in Deconstruction (Chicago: U of Chicago P,1997) 27 . 6 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004) 25, 26. 7 Giovanna Borradori, ed., Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Ju rgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003) 120. Henceforth cited in the text as PTT . 8 Martin Ha gglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and theTime of Life (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008) 171. 9 Carrie Rohman, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (New York: Columbia UP, 2009) 29. 10 Sigmund Freud, Fetishism in The Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth,1975).

139

posthumanism to come
Masters (New 1964) 1 16. York: Bedford/St. Martins, 28 See Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Oxford: Clarendon,1876) 311. 29 Leonard Lawlor, This is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida (New Y ork: Columbia UP, 2007) 109. 30 Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005) 53, 36. 31 Gary Francione, for instance, draws the line at sentience because . . . sentient beings have interests and the possession of interests is the necessary and sufficient condition for membership in the human community. See Gary Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2000) 175. See also James Rachels, Drawing Lines in Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, eds. Cass R. Sunstein and Martha Craven Nussbaum (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005) 162^74. 32 See Jacques Derrida, Eating Well, or the Calculation of the Subject in Points . . . Interviews, 1974^1994, ed. Elizabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995) 282. Derrida does not explicitly link the lesser violence to eating well. Y et both phrases emerge in the context of discussions on ethics and violence. Derrida observes that the latter phrase implies a respect for the other at the very moment when . . . one must begin to identify with the other, who is to be assimilated, interiorized, understood ideally (283). Eating well thus invokes the same play of difference and sameness at work in the lesser violence, which in turn negotiates an irresolvable conflict between the desire to appropriate alterity and the others resistance to such assimilation. 33 Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia UP, 2008) 144. 34 In another passage, Calarco argues more forcefully that the human^animal distinction should be abolished or, at the very least, be treated with considerable caution and suspicion (143). With regard to the latter point, who could seriously contend that Derrida has not treated the human^animal distinction with substantial vigilance and wariness? Calarcos own analysis admits as much when he observes that, from the very earliest to the latest texts, Derrida is keenly

22 Sigmund Freud,Our Attitude toward Death, The Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth,1957) 289. 23 Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality , Immortality , and Other Life Strategies (Cambridge: Polity, 1992) 17; original emphasis. 24 Agamben, The Open 16. 25 Jacques Derrida, Ulysses Gramophone:TwoWords for Joyce, trans. Tina Kendall and Shari Benstock, in Peggy Kamuf, ed., A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (New York: Columbia UP, 1991) 576. Henceforth cited in the text as UG. For more on the role of the yes in deconstructive thought, see my Derridas Ouija Board, Qui Parle 17 .2 (2009): 85^101. 26 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (New Y ork: Routledge, 2001) 400 n. 21. 27 Samir Haddad suggests that Derrida ceased referring to the lesser violence after Violence and Metaphysics because the phrase implies a normative decision-making procedure that deconstruction requires us to forfeit. If we can never know with any absolute certainty whether a given act constitutes the lesser or the greater violence, then it makes no sense to employ these terms. This perpetual ignorance, however, does not require the suspension of all normative judgments. In The Force of Law, for instance, Derrida argues that the ordeal of the undecidable . . . must be gone through by any decision worthy of the name. See The Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, eds. Drucilla Cornell and Michel Rosenfeld (New York: Routledge, 1992) 24. To claim that we cannot make a decision with a view toward a lesser violence (even if it turns out that our decision has resulted in worse violence) is a bit like proposing that, since the signified of any signifier remains undecidable, then we ought not to ascribe any meaning to written or spoken language, no matter how provisional. In other words, Haddad seems to confuse the Derridean notion of undecidability with an unnecessarily paralyzing indecisiveness. See Samir Haddad, A Genealogy of Violence, from Light to the Autoimmune, Diacritics 38.1^2 (2008): 121^ 42.

140

peterson
aware of and intent on problematizing the anthropocentric underpinnings and orientation of philosophy and associated discourses (104). 35 Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of the Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003) 1. Henceforth cited in the text as AR. 36 Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010) xvi. Henceforth cited in the text as WIP. 37 The complete list of theorists is as follows: (1) Humanist Humanism (Habermas, Rawls, Ferry, Heidegger); (2) Humanist Posthumanism (Nussbaum, Singer, Regan); iz (3) Posthumanist Humanism (Rorty, Z ek, Foucault); (4) Posthumanist Posthumanism (Derrida, Haraway, Latour, Luhmann, Maturana, and Varela). 38 Despite the misgivings that I outline below with regard to the institutionalization of the posthumanities, in no way do these remarks reflect my assessment of the many admirable authors and books published within the Posthumanities series, some of which directly challenge the language of posthumanism. As I have noted above, Haraways insistence in When Species Meet that she is not a posthumanist seeks to unknow the human in a manner similar to what I propose in the final section of this essay. Perhaps as a concession to the series in which her book appears, however, Haraway describes the term posthumanities as a useful notion for tracking scholarly conversations (308). 39 Cary Wolfe,Posthumanities (2006), available 5http://www.carywolfe.com/postabout.html4 (accessed 2 Dec. 2010). 40 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and Sovereign, Vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009) 158,157 . 41 Jacques Derrida, Letter to a Japanese Friend, trans. David Wood and Andrew Benjamin, in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New Y ork: Columbia UP,1991) 275.

Christopher Peterson School of Humanities and Languages, Bankstown Campus Building 7 University of Western Sydney Locked Bag 1797 Penrith, NSW 2751 Australia E-mail: c.peterson@uws.edu.au

Copyright of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.