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YOU CAN’T PUT DESCARTES BEFORE DA’ HORSE: (Re)Connecting with Human Animality through Evolution, Poetry, and Batialle

Poetry describes nothing that does not slip toward the unknowable…The animal opens before me a depth that attracts me and is familiar to me. In a sense, I know this depth: it is my own depth. It is also that which is farthest removed from me, that which deserves the name depth, which means precisely that which is unfathomable to me. But this too is poetry… Bataille, Theory of Religion I. Science, community and the liminal-human: Communities are erected around individuals who feel that they share common features. Homogeneity exists within the culture, while, nevertheless, there is also enough heterogeneity to allow the community to prosper. In other words, heterogeneity, too, holds a necessary place in a community; by providing difference the population remains vibrant and resists stagnation. However, this heterogeneity must, it is thought, be tempered by exclusion—that which is deemed too heterogeneous is cast out of the community. Those elements that are too different, those elements with which the community does not know how to classify, they are eliminated from the community. However, these errant qualities exist in reference to the community, nonetheless. They inhabit a threshold realm, dwelling within a liminal state—neither completely apart from the community nor existing fully within it, attached the community like an appendage, a mere vestige whose purpose is lost to the community’s understanding. What it is to be a species revolves around the same issues and concerns involved in emergence of a community. What is to count and belong within a given species and what is excluded have been debated since the conception of speciation. While the classification of what constitutes a species has changed throughout history, whether this is based upon morphological features or genetics, what has not changed is the grouping of similarities among a disparate group. And just as in the formation of community there are elements that do not fit neatly into a strict categorization. For example, how is one to classify feral children or animals that have learned the use of language? Both of these examples reveal a lack in the ability of rational classification to take into account outliers. A feral child and an animal that has learned the use of language exist among the threshold of a boundary where the distinction between humanity and animality is lost. More striking, what if we are all like the feral child, dwelling within the liminal state, passing between the animal and the human realm without an abode in either? The separation of the natural world into discrete categories of classification is not a new subject, indeed this act has been a concern of Western philosophy since its conception. Plato, in his Cratylus, discusses whether assigning names is a natural process revealing some quality that belongs essentially to the object, or if this process is simply conventional. Aristotle, following Plato’s concerns, develops a system of genus and species, under which particular objects in the world can be place under a universal term to which the former belongs, e.g., Socrates and human. Although there is much difference between the two philosophers, their respective theories (whether interpreted correctly or not) have been thought to be based within the realm of reason. Discursive thought, or reason, lives parasitically off of the existence of dualisms or multiplicities; this form of rationality is driven by the desire to impose its sovereignty upon the dualism putting them in a hierarchical order. The function of reason is to reveal a method through a disparate collection of objects, collecting them into a natural harmony. Historically, Aristotle’s thought has laid the groundwork for later thinkers to develop a naturalized hierarchy of biological entities, (e.g., certain Scholastic thinkers, then later Linnaeus, and Buffon). Founded within reason, it is believed that there naturally inheres within the animal a quality that necessitates such categorization. An essentialistic species concept develops from this method: “variation was interpreted as due to an imperfect manifestation of the eidos which resulted in ‘accidental’ attributes,” each of the individual organisms being the imperfect manifestation of their essence. Michael Ruse claims, Species, like Drosophila melanogaster or canis lupus, are thought to be ‘natural’, in some way objective or existing independently of the classifier. In this, species differ from the groups (taxa) found at other ranks, for instance that of genus. The classifier’s own thoughts and aims have a much greater role to play in the delimiting of member of these other groups.

Thus, assigning names to living entities becomes a natural process, provided that one, using reason and rationality, has access to the reality underlying the ontological ground of the particular living entity. I do not wish to enter into a full and lengthy discussion concerning the different methods for classifying species, instead, I simply wish to emphasize that such systems originate from the belief that if one can only get at a reality that is hidden behind the multiplicities of particular living organisms, one could the possess the possibility to separate the diversity of living organisms into naturally occurring species. These species are, consequently, thought to exist by nature as independent units. Reason and discursive thought group similar entities into distinct and separate collections, whether these similarities are found morphologically or genetically. These collections are understood to be unconnected with each other in any real and ontological respect. Even after the advent of evolution, which seems to undermine essentialism by making the boundaries between species vague, some wish to argue that although species do not have an absolute status as they had for Aristotle or Plato, nor are they completely subjectively derived as for Locke, there is nonetheless something that underlies the concept species, a quality that gives it ontological weight. One such theory, stipulates that because of the multiplicity of biological organisms and since one can place them within more or less natural kinds, one is “inclined to think that there’s more than mere chance at work.” What is at work in this theory, and as we will come to see similar theories, a belief that the ground of reality is indeed rational and allows for the possibility if such categorization. Perhaps what is meant by reason, discursive thought, or rationality should be stated explicitly. These terms are meant to indicate a closed economic system of thought. It names a system that dogmatically presupposes certain concerns; these terms identity a self-referential discussion. This must be what is meant by reason, if one is to hold that all living organisms can be placed within species—it already presupposes its completeness or a sense of the whole. In other words, such a system suggests that from within this system, all things are knowable and all questions may be addressed. For the sake of clarity, this method of classification says that it knows the being of all things. Among the other presuppositions that rationality proposes is the existence of a reality ‘out there’, separated from and set over and against the subject, which can only be mediated to the human by the use of language and discursive reasoning. The subject/object divide makes it impossible for a direct experience of the phenomena of the world to appear in their becoming. Consequently, Western philosophy has been infected with a consciousness of dualism. Dualisms saturate our thoughts and “all are hierarchical.” One may wish to ask oneself, however, whether the closed economy of rationalistic dualism could be ruptured. There is a fundamental question that must be asked; how are we to classify and distinguish between species when the boundary or threshold between those species is blurred, such as when we take seriously the animal found within the human? What if the fundamental presupposition that reason is sovereign is challenged? What if at the heart of reality what we find is not a static ground of reason that can be categorized, but rather an overwhelming force that is hors catégorie? The above questions are not simply theoretical. Certainly after Darwinian evolutionary theory, the human cannot question its animal heritage, and so it cannot deny the animality that is at the heart of its very being—or at the very least places the animality below its humanity. Consequently, the human, because of and through the use of discursive reasoning has classified its humanity to be more fundamental than its animality. One judges, then, that one’s humanity is more essential to one’s ontological being than one’s animality. However, the classification system is troubled not only by theories of evolution but also by living organisms found within the world. For example, what of animals with the use of language or humans without the use of language and reason, the feral child, for example, both of which cannot fit in the dualism of human and animal, being neither wholly one nor wholly the other? That is, how do humans and animals living in a liminal state affect the classification of species? Who are these beings living within the threshold, but are neither man nor beast? And are we not all such liminal creatures? And lastly, if we are all to some extent living within the margins but turn a blind eye to this dwelling space, how do we now describe this animal abode within us? Moreover, the systems of scientific classification, grounded in the traditional assumptions of modernity that there is an object/subject divide, must presuppose that the ground of being is never fully lost to the human being. One can always attain an adequate mediated re-presentation of this ground. Reason, rational consciousness and discursive discourse, are the methods that modernity has taught us that compel the human being to believe that one can re-represent that which appears foreclosed to us, but is able to faithfully correspond to this ground. This capacity to re-present, we suppose, gives human beings a special place in the world as the only species that is able to use reason and categorize the world, as opposed to animals whom we suppose do not possess reason, and therefore have no re-presentation of the world. Consequently, thinking the world under a ratio-centric rubric already creates an inherently sharp divide between the human and the animal. It is the purpose of this paper to attempt a humble rethinking of the relationship between the human and its animality. Theories of language, the relationship between human and animal consciousness, theories of accessing the disavowed ground of our being not founded within discursive discourse will be discussed to show, at least prima facia, that recouping our animality is of the utmost importance if the human being is going to live most authentically and ethically. To reconnect, however, with our animality through reason and discursive thought, but rather towards an acknowledgement of the validity of one’s animality on the level of poetry, i.e., within non-discursive discourse. The question lurking in the background of this paper will be whether the animal is ever fully present to the human such that it can be re-presented, or whether the human must silently gaze at the animal and the animality found within the human. If the animal is never fully and literally present to the human, we must be content with assigning the animal to the poetically divine realm. A final question arises, then, from this discussion is how does this shape one’s relationship to one’s own animality. II. Paleolithic man, animal, poetry, and tool use: The human being has always found itself within the world of other animals. As homo sapiens burgeoned forth into the world, their first allies were wolves. Homo sapiens and canis lupus formed a community which not only learned from each other, but evolved along side one another as well, literally transforming and, perhaps, influencing each others’ ontological ground. It is said that from the wolves homo sapiens learned to eat meat and the benefits of hunting in packs, it has been suggested that on account of this relationship homo sapiens flourished over Neanderthals. As a result, the very existence of the human depended upon the wolf; thus, what it is to be human has its ground within animality. Having had its very being sculpted in an interplay between the human and the animal, the early homo sapiens not only acknowledged but revered and emphasized the animality found within its ontological core. If one examines, for example, the cave paintings at the Lascaux caves, created circa 13,500 BCE, one will immediately notice the figure of a man, a shaman, with the head of a bird. Indeed, the animal seems to be have been given precedence over the human. At Lascaux, while the human is often depicted in stick figure form, the animal is drawn in great detail—this is evidence that at this time there was little species differentiation. The two were not thought of in terms a duality, but instead if not existing within the same realm then living within the same spectrum of reality, blurring the boundaries between the humanity and animality. On the wall of the Lascaux caves not only are animality and the human connected, but, as is revealed by the bird-headed shaman, animality and the sacred are intimately linked—animality/humanity as the sacred or the divine are united. The sacred/divine is that which is experienced when reason reaches its limit. It is a rupture experienced in one’s everydayness. The sacred is sacred and divine precisely because after entering the realm of the sacred one cannot discursively communicate what exactly one experienced. Consequently, it leaves one powerless, lying prostrate before the experience, since the sacred cannot be placed in a rational, economic and discursive mode of communication. One can only gesture toward the experience in non-rational poetic silence. By combining humanity with animality, an impossible ideal is established, the superhuman must appear inhuman. (Only in a poetic parody of the human could the space for a great question mark be opened concerning the being of humanity.) Moreover, one can hardly glace over the erect penis of the bird-headed shaman falling backward in front of the injured, dying, and enraged bison. Consequently, in this image of the relationship between man and animal there is more than a hint of eroticism. The erotic and the sacred have been coupled since their conception. The erotic is the overwhelming power that opens the human being to be become the site of receiving and responding to the sacred. The shaman’s falling backward in the throws of, what can only be described as erotic passion, mirrors what Plato writes in the Phaedrus. At 254bff of the Phaedrus, the charioteer, gazing about its beloved, remembers the true beauty it once saw—the beauty that underlies the lovers ontological being—he involuntarily falls backward in awe and because he is overwhelmed in erotic longing. What is important to note is that just as the Platonic lover falls backward due to the power of awe and erotic longing experiencing the overwhelming force of that which is at its ontological core, what can only be described as the sacred; so too the bird-headed shaman falls backward with engorged penis perhaps for the same reason, he is overcome with awe and erotic longing to return to his disavowed abode—the indistinguishable threshold between the animal and the human. Certainly there is a proclivity toward bestiality in this painting that becomes lucid when linked with a discussion of the Platonic erotic longing toward the beautiful. Associating erotic longing with the animal serves the function of drawing our attention to the useless and valueless significance of the sacred. The animal does not place an economic value on sex, instead the animal engages in “random and mindless copulation.” The animal, through its indifference and disregard for the utility of sex, explodes any closed economic sphere of value that the human may place upon the erotic drive toward beauty. Consequently, the human is reminded that that toward which it is aimed cannot be reached by human hands, the beauty that it seeks is held in a space that is inaccessible precisely because it holds no value. If one extends to hand towards it, the beautiful recedes into the background, lost behind capitalistic and monetary exchange. What the human, in truth, seeks and that which the animal is always already immersed in is an impossible beauty, a divine and sacred magnificence. Perhaps the reason why the distinction between animality and humanity has not yet been made by Paleolithic man is because the animal is not yet understood to be a tool; the human being has not yet believed itself to have mastered the animal either as use-object or even the animality within itself. Although there is a spear and a gravely wounded animal in the Lascaux paintings, there is no indication that the animal is reduced to a mere use-object. Rather the intertwining of animality and humanity illustrated in the shaman and his obvious erotic posture, implies that the animal is revered. One could think of this scene in terms of Bataillian sacrifice, The principle of sacrifice is destruction, but though it sometimes goes so far as to destroy completely (as in a holocaust), the destruction that sacrifice is intended to bring about is not annihilation. The thing—only the thing—is what sacrifice means to destroy in the victim. Sacrifice destroys an object’s real ties of subordination; it draws the victim out of the world of utility and restores it to that of unintelligible caprice.

Sacrifice makes a mere thing sacred by tearing out of its defining and delimiting use-vale (exchangeability, homogeneity), making it unique, bringing us into communion with that which exceeds the world as order, defined, and mastered according to the economically calculative understanding with which we usually operate. Tearing the animal out of the sphere of utility, sacrificing it, exposes the non-teleological core found in the human in the form of animality. The animal’s actions are “without theme, climax, or denouement, they extend from the middle; they are durations.” There can be no use-value without an end, goal, function or purpose—the value is not derived from an external referent but from the on going incomprehensible process of the action itself. Moreover, it is through this type of violence and killing that “one increases life, and it is, in fact, exactly in those parts of the world that the most horrible and grotesque rituals of…sacrifice obtain even to this day, their inspiration being the notion that to activate life one kills.” If we are to reinterpret this quotation from Joseph Campbell and have a conception of sacrifice in terms of Bataillian philosophy, we are confronted with pure excess, a flood of riches that can neither be repaid nor understood in economic/rational terms. To perform a sacrifice is to transgress the dead, static and barren ground upon which discursive thought is grown. Only new life, new growth can burgeon forth out of the destruction of the rational, the pre-calculative, and preplanned. Because human emotions are bound and interlaced with utility and are ratio-centric, the human know longer knows if or what he or she is feeling. But the raw, bare emotion of the animal that has no reference to the rational utility that humans have interacting with others, opens a space for the human to reflect awestruck by the immediacy and openness of the animal emotion. Consequently, if one were to acknowledge the animality found at the core of humanity, one must be willing to make a sacrifice of one’s own humanity. If one is to become awestruck at the wolf that still remains within us, and not fear “the supernatural fear of the werewolf as our inner awareness of the beast within us, a savage self that must be controlled so that it may not consume ourselves and those around us” [my emphasis]. Rather, one should give this inner beast a place to flourish, and to consume our economic and rational selves, leaving us rent, powerless before the force, but no longer subordinate to the sovereignty of anthropocentric reason. Tool use is most often cited as that which separates the human from the animal. While this has been proven to be a long standing misconception, let us take a certain aspect of this misconception as true—that of language (although this too will be challenged in a certain respect, but in a way to reveal its limitation that it places upon the human being). It has been stressed above that through the recognition of animality, the human has a small window of opportunity to glimpse an immediate relationship with his ontological ground, there is an immanence with the world—nothing was posited outside of the immediate present. Homo habilis, the handy-human, as the classification indicate and emphasize, were among the first Paleolithic humanoids to make use of tools, and Neanderthals were even given the name Homo faber, the tool-making-human. At this time, I would like to give a brief discussion of tool use: how tools shaped the way the way later homo sapiens viewed the world; how language may be counted as among the genre of tools; and whether animals have such a capacity, and if so how should this influence our view of the animal. Georges Bataille argues that “the positing of the object, which is not given in animality, is in the human use of tools…insofar as tools are developed with their end in view, consciousness posits them as objects, as interruptions in the indistinct continuity.” The animal, Bataille claims, because it does not use tools, possesses no conscious thought in the sense of reflective moments. Bataille, not without hesitation, wishes to emphasize that animality has an immediate relation to the world. The animal, and the human before the use of tools, are “in the world like water in water,” a flowing immanence. The tool as object disrupts a continuous current thought, establishing a beginning and a presupposed end, a telos to thought, so that thought is no longer an unbroken stream or flow of immanence, but is now directed toward some end. The world, then, too, is after the advent of the tool understood in terms of discrete objects. Even the human being begins to see itself as an object of the world, “In the end, we perceive each appearance—subject (ourselves), animal, mind, world—from within and from without at the same time, both as continuity, with respect to ourselves, and as object.” To perceive one’self as subject is the development of consciousness, it is to posit one’self as an object upon which one is able to reflect—and use. Through the use of the tool, the human begins to distance itself not only from the world but from itself as well. The tool ushers in an exteriority into the world where there was none before. The world, through the lens of the tool, is now conceived of as object that can be shaped by the power of the tool and the subject who uses the tool. A dualism appears. These tools allow one a sense of control over the object that is under the influence of the tool; a means-end, and thus utility, consciousness is born. The dualism/consciousness appears in the sense of alienation, “this is the basic principle: to subordinate is not only to alter the subordinated element but to be altered one’self…Nature becomes man’s property but it ceases to be immanent to him. It is on his condition that it is closed to him.” In subordinating an object, the human being gains a false sense of power, a false sense of distance. What forces the human to forget that it is part of the world; he denies the world and because he is part of the world, denies himself in the process. One finds oneself in a world surrounded by things, and as a thing oneself all of these objects are equal. Yet it is the human being that can, nevertheless, compel an object to have a function and purpose that is foreign to the reality of which it is made. The agrarian purpose of a calf, to be slaughtered, processed, packaged, and cooked is foreign to immanent vast depth of the calf. Likewise, when a human becomes a farmer, this human does not belong to itself nor is it itself, it is like the plow that tills the soil for another, so that another may eat; the farmer and calf are strangers to themselves. Out of the duality that the tool marshals in—a world of subject and object—humanity is confronted with the need to call out to the distant world, which was so immediate before. Thusly, language develops. Language develops out of a need to confront the vastness, since the world and one’self are now estranged. Just as the stone had to be shaped to create a shovel to obtain roots and other stone’s hit and struck to create a sharp edge to fashion a cutting tool, so language may have been developed to help create a cut, a de-cision within the world. Language allows one to manipulate the world to one’s own end. Language, at least as we conceive it in the West, is propositionally based; a property can be predicated to a subject through the copula. Two seemingly unrelated terms can now be joined and manipulated as in a syllogism. Thus science, classification, reason, and discursive discourse emerge from language. Because language brings with it many of the characteristics in which humans pride themselves, it is little wonder why humans are loathed to attribute language to animal. Language and reason are so closely linked that when a case for animal language is made, certain individuals attempt to explain what looks like language in the animal is merely ‘communication’ without a proper syntax. Certainly, one could infer that granting animals the capacity for language makes some an uneasy feeling, if one believes language is unique to humans, since this would blur the boundary between humanity and animality. I, for one, feel a sense of despair for animals that have been taught to speak. I will argue that it is an act of violence against the animality of the animal forcing them to become homogenized to our, the human, way of thinking and to our form of consciousness. As well as ask, whether animals learning to communicate as humans does indeed blur the threshold between the animal and the human or only reinforces it and making it more pronounced. III. Language as tool and the animal: Perhaps the most well known examples of animals taught human language are the gorillas, Washoe and Koko. Beatrice Gardner taught American Sign Language to Washoe while Francine Patterson taught Koko, giving the gorillas the ability to use language despite the morphological incapacity for spoken language. It has been questioned whether these gorillas are truly using language to communicate or whether they are using language to simply get what they want, using language as a means to an end. Furthermore, some have questioned whether a new breed of Clever Hans are being born. It has been stated that “apes have more sophisticated ways to cheat” than did Hans. For example, Washoe and Koko may have learned the words associated with certain objects in the world but merely stumbled upon a grammar that humans would recognize. Certain sequences of words are more useful than others: the phrase “‘please machine give milk’ works better than others such as ‘give milk machine’. Once the animal has learned these associations, it can give the appearance of understanding…” There is an assumption that human children, to whom language is also new, do not learn language in this trail and error way and do not use language for its utility, or perhaps the assumption is made that it is natural for human children to learn language in this manner but not for animals. This view is understandable because if we have all learned language as trail and error and none of us wish to be different than the rest of humanity then certainly we would embrace it. But when an animal displays language use in this way the human must explain it away as being different than human acquisition of language or else the animal is too much like us, or worse we are too much like them. It has been reported that Washoe displayed the ability to spontaneously create new signs, calling a toilet “dirty good” and a refrigerator an “open food drink” although these objects were only referred to as “potty chair” and “cold box,” respectively. However, this has been questioned on the grounds that Washoe may not have creatively combined the words “water” and “bird” into “water bird” when noticing a swan, since she may have simply seen the water and a bird and made the appropriate signs for each without a conceptual connection to each other. And so it has been stated “with primate language research, the more the data are examined the less impressive they are. It seems that you can lead an ape to words but you can’t get it to ‘speak as we do’” [italics mine] and yet, immediately after, it is admitted “human languages are not necessarily the only way to ‘make one’s thoughts understood’.” Does this not already open the argument to a critique of a type of communication other than human and that is just as a valid connection to ‘what is’, something that the human must return. Take for example the bee’s wiggle-waggle dance as a means of communication. This is a means of communication, through dance, that represents not only the distance of the food source but also the quality of the nectar and the ease at which it can be found. The world is fully represented to the hive mates through non-spoken, inarticulate, by human standards, communication. However, the bee’s wiggle-waggle dance has reduced to an expression of the bee’s forthcoming actions and not reflecting anything concerning the external world. It has been argued that it is not a language, or communicates anything, but only produces an immediate response in other bees: for the real bee the dance had no conceptual connotation at all: if the bee is the dancer, the dance is ‘called up’ by an internal organic state that was in turn induced by the preceding flight from a food source…real bees cannot lie….The dance, in short, is not a symbol that connotes an idea but a sign that commands action…hence there can be no real conversation between humans and bees, or between bees, if by that we mean an intentional exchange of idea between thinking subjects.

Tim Ingold critiques this account by drawing our attention to the fact that humans seldom act with practical ends in mind and behave in an almost automatic fashion, just as do the bees, if we must assume that they do. So that holding bees and other animals to a higher standard than we do ourselves already prejudices the inquiry. Ingold further states, “it is important to bear in mind that fully articulate, propositional language, such as in printed books, is not the norm of human communication…non-verbal communication which we share with other animals.” If human communication intersects so greatly with animal communication, it must be asked, whether discursive discourse is the most authentic and originary form of communication of and relationship with the ground of being, ‘what is’? It may, however, be a misnomer either side of debate to label the bees’, or any animals, use of language as “language.” This term carries with it so much anthropocentrism that the discussion may already color our thinking of the issue too much. Is it correct to assume that the correct, i.e., rational, way to understand the world is through the lens of a subject-object distinction instead of a more immediate relationship to the world, a world in which the bee’s action and the world are indistinguishable—at least discursively speaking? Regardless of whether animals have the use of language or not does not seem to be the real debate for those who wish to claim that animals do possess such a capacity. Rather proponents of language use of animals are concerned with understanding what it is to be an animal. They are concerned with asking the animal what the animal’s experience qua animal is through the use of language, since it is believed that this will re-present the animal that is thought to be present before us. It is argued that “the language skills of these animals have given us our best access to nonhuman consciousness.” While a case will be made for the absurdity of such a project, the project on the surface seems benign and its intentions good; the project bridges the gap between the animal and humanity so that a more ethical approach may be given to the species question. In other words, such researchers wish to break down the strict classification between the animal and the human, since “the concept of mind as we human beings experience it—that is, mediated by symbolic language and carrying out cogent essence of self-awareness—has for many people come to represent an unbreachable boundary between humans and nonhumans.” Given this venture, it would seem that the human is able to speak to animals and of their experience of the world, bridging the species gap. After all, “when asked whether she was an animal or a person, Koko signed ‘Fine animal gorilla’.” We seem to be receiving a report as to Koko’s emotional state. However, before we assume that we know Koko truly feels pride in being an animal (which she very will may) we have to ask under what conditions this question is asked. Koko has known no life other than behind bars surrounded by humans—she looks out from her cage and must already be conscious of being other than human. While this certainly indicates a reflection upon herself, the utterance ‘Fine animal gorilla’ may be more of a protest: an animal-rights declaration made from an animal. One may ask, is the ‘power’ of language a gift given to Koko and other animals or a curse, making them aware of her own powerlessness and otherness in the face of the human and the constraining confines in which she finds herself? Without the power of language and being placed in a cage, would Koko need to make such a pronouncement? Has being placed behind bars and given the ability to reflect ‘rationally’ and discursively upon her own condition forced Koko to defend her animality? In ‘bestowing’ the knowledge of language (and presumably reason) on animals only to then demand that they report to us what it is to be like an animal, have we not reduced them to a mere use-object? If so, they have entered in the exchange of commodity. Consequently, according to Bataille’s critique of tool use, such animals become foreign to the humans that are studying them and are assigned a use that is foreign to the animal itself. Have we not turned them into a sideshow, something to perform for our (be)-amusement and wonder? As is evident from the cave paintings, Paleolithic man never asked what the animal feels about the world, never reducing the animal to an object of rational inquiry. The animal always stood outside his discourse, never presenting itself for the Paleolithic man; hence it is relegated to the sacred or divine realm. That the animal has now become a thing is nearly axiomatic; it has lost its status as the human being’s fellow creature due to its enforced utility. Perhaps the animal has to be reduced to a use-object since we have become ashamed at and fear the animality within us. We regard animality as a defect. Our animality, through language, has become so lost to us, disavowed; that we must turn the animal as human as it possibly can become, just to glimpse what we once revered. But a glimpse is all we can stand: the human can only peer through the bars of a cage from afar; we cannot come face to face with the animality in our being. The human does not wish to give up that which it believes sets it apart—language, reason, and discourse—horrified to lose our human dignity. So, we create a creature that is neither fully human (by species) nor fully animal (through the use of language), fashioning a mirror to distort an image of that which already lies within. (Have we not already crafted a real mythical creature, a real Bigfoot, a real vampire, a real werewolf, a were-ape, so as to safely confront a real version of that which lies in the realm of the mythical?) We are confronted with a being that does not conform to the classical classification system—it is alone in the world, a creature that exists in a liminal state, something that the human once was and embraced but now turns its back upon and shuns, placing it in a cage to be safely studied. IV. Attempting to reclaim our animality through literature and poetry: “There is every indication that the first men were closer than we are to the animal world; they distinguished the animal from themselves perhaps, but not without a feeling of doubt mixed with terror and longing.” For the Paleolithic human the animal, as we have seen above, offered the human a fascination with and access to the sacred, a world that exists beyond the profane world filled with the poverty of rationalistic tool use. What may have held early homo sapiens spellbound by the animal was the way in which it so easily and without protest immersed itself into the profound depths of the sacred. However, the human infected with reason, rationality, and the need to control will not go into the uncharted waters of the divine without resistance. Language, as we have seen, attempts to capture one’s experience into a discursive whole. Consequently, to delve into that which cannot be incarcerated within the limits of language is a most terrifying creature to experience, indeed. Conceivably then, if we are to understand the animal, we must make a sacrifice of language to go beyond language, only to come out again, overwhelmed by and lying prostrate before the power of the incommunicable sacred. We may have to instead, ask our questions to the animal and take the silent stare of their eyes as answer enough. As has been stressed above, a chauvinism is revealed on the part of humanity in forcing the animal to conform to the human way of communication. It is assumed that The essence of the difference between the human and the animal mind is often claimed to be that man can reflect upon his actions while animals, lacking words, cannot. Crucial to this view is the underlying and unspoken premise that language is the only possible means of reflection. Without language how can we ask an animal what it is to think? And without language how can it tell us? And if it cannot tell us, how can we legitimately assume that it is thinking?

Discursive language is assumed to be the only way that one can converse with an animal. It is thought to be the only mode of access to the animal. Thomas Nagel makes such assumptions in his essay “What is it like to be a bat?” Nagel shapes and revolves his essay around the question of consciousness in terms of the mind-body problem and why the usual understanding of the problem does not help us resolve the question of consciousness and the mind-body question. Thomas Nagel admits that consciousness exists on an almost infinite scale at the many levels of animal life; he states moreover, “…no matter how the form may vary, the fact that the organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is to be that organism…fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.” His inquiry, then, seems to be based not merely upon the grounds of epistemology but upon ontology as well. To have the capacity for consciousness requires that the animal is in the world, it has a particular way of being in the environment within which it finds itself. Yet do we have access to such a realm? Each living organism, according to Nagel, dwells in its own conscious sphere of experiential existence. As such, a human can never know what it is to be a bat; to be a bat, with its echo location sonar, is alien to the human because the bat’s experience of the phenomena presented before it is experienced in a way that the human cannot comprehend rationally. The human can only conjecture what it is to be like a bat for the human being, “I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves.” Anything but a literal expression falls short of Nagel’s project. A poetic narrative, a myth as to what it is to be a bat cannot measure up to Nagel’s standard. To think as a bat does would entail being able to have the consciousness of the bat, that is to say, given the equivocation between consciousness and ontology, we would have to literally be a bat. Consequently, Nagel posits that there is something essential to being a bat; there is a bat-ness that is incommensurable with human-ness. He claims that it is our physical structure as humans that precludes our understanding and conceiving what it is to be a bat; it is “simply because our structure does not permit us to operate with concepts of the requisite type.” Although Nagel approaches the problem in a quasi-phenomenological manner, he falls into the same trap as those who came before him, who place species into ridge classifications. Essentialism saturates Thomas Nagel’s essay, and as such, as we saw above, the essentialism situates a centrality of reason. Reason, here as it has been used through this essay, being understood to be a closed economic system that presupposes certain concepts and can only speak to and encapsulate those presuppositions, hence the reason of a human and the reason of a bat are incommensurable. Although Nagel does, however, make the claim that “reflection on what it is like to be a bat seems to lead us, therefore, to the conclusion that there are facts that do not consist in the trust of propositions expressible in a human language.” Here, Nagel opens his argument to several lines of critique. One line of argumentation that can be leveled against Nagel is his focus on only one method of accessing reality, i.e., rational consciousness. By locating his argument in the classical mind-body problematic, what are given focus are the mind and the rational. That which does not think as the human does is made radically other; if the other’s consciousness, which cannot be expressed in human language is different, alien, and thusly runs the risk of seeming dangerous, something that must be reigned in and degraded. Yet, what if the common thread that binds all living entities entails that which can be known only non-rationally? J.M. Coetzee opens Nagel’s argument that the consciousness of animal is closed to us by appealing to emotions. Sympathy allows one access to the consciousness of another human; one may not be able know discursively the tragic loss of another, but one can, through sympathy, imagine one’self in the role of the other. Coetzee is describing the possibility of fictive, poetic narrative constructed around the life of the individual with whom one is in sympathy; an emotional biography is written. She describes this capacity of sympathy as a “fullness of being.” Coetzee is not describing a life of empty rational contemplation and a world ‘out-there’, an intellectual world separated from the embodied world. We might be able to put Coetzee’s ideas in phenomenological terms. Following from Coetzee’s thought, the individual, instead, becomes the site of experience of the phenomena of the world, a persönliche stimmung is developed. From Heidegger’s Being and Time onward it is revealed that Dasein has a pre-cognitive and necessary relationship to its world. Stimmung is used to express Dasein’s always already having its world, its being affected by the world, the elements of which are further disclosed interpretively by identifying a thing as this or that. A stimmung is not a mood that is subjective or internal which may or may not have a connection with the world, to ’what is’. Rather it is an original pre-cognitive relation to its intentional object, being determined by the world. Hence, it is not the task of a thinker, then, as it was in the modern period, to establish an indubitable re-presentative connection to the world outside of the subject. But rather the task is to let what is always already there, sounding and echoing through the subject, who then must express the experience of this pre-cognitive echoing in a discursive manner. The individual is always already open to the world, but the pre-cognitive relation is veiled by reason and discursive language and communication. If the boundaries between the subject-object, the individual and the world are broken down, there is reason to believe that the animal too experiences the world in a manner that is not different in kind as compared to the human but in degree. Perhaps, the degree is not even that great. Or, if the difference is great, perhaps the animal, unclouded by discursive language experiences the world more immediately, for there is no need for the animal to return to the world as there is for the human. The “fullness of being” that Coetzee describes and the way it opens the human to the consciousness of the animal, brings to our attention, then, a way-of-being, a kind of consciousness, that is shared by all living entities and something which the human must approach. The human must return to this state of immediacy, but upon exiting the immediacy and attempting to communicate it, it becomes once again infinitely distant, due to language’s mediating power. Although true communication of this experience is impossible, through poetry, myth, and literature, one can only gesture towards it. Let us now turn to literature, as the only means by which, to see what is revealed concerning the relationships between the animal and the human, and between humanity and animality. Kafka addresses the animal’s immediacy and openness to the world by focusing upon the animal’s natural lack of language. Additionally, through Kafka and matching it with Bataille, a discussion of language as silence and its ability to form a community around that which exceeds discursive understanding is revealed. Through these discussions it will finally be revealed how the human is confronted with its animality. In Kafka’s story “A Report to the Academy” scientists are met face to face with Red Peter, an ape who, like Koko, learned to use language. Red Peter’s speech is full of irony, that if appreciated brings to light the destructive and violent force of language, that not only Red Peter had to endure but that humans too must experience when beginning to use language. For example, the name ‘Red Peter’ was given to the ape by his human captors on account of the bloody wound on his cheek he received after being shot, a name that is, we are told “utterly inappropriate, which only some ape could have thought of.” Naming, the act of classification, is tied to violence. Not only was the name given as a result of physical violence, but the name ‘Red Peter’ does not naturally belong to the ape, it is forced upon him by his captors. To be named is a form of linguistic rape and pillaging, an act of violence forced upon one; the name does not belong to one, but compels one to fit into a sphere that is defined by language. The ape must be named to appear less dangerous, less creature like. Furthermore, naming allows for the coping process to begin, the human captors must handle the violence done to Red Peter, to ease their minds. The incarceration that language represents is found metaphorically in the literal cage in which Red Peter finds himself as he awakens aboard the ship. The cage is too small to either stand up or to sit down, so that Red Peter was forced, he tells the academy to “squat with my knees bent and trembling all the time.” The cage like the impending arrival of language is equally disruptive, making one uncomfortable, agitated and without room to either sleep or stand tall. This method we are told “of confining wild beasts is supposed to have its advantages during the first days of captivity, and out of my own experiences I cannot deny that from the human point of view this is really the case.” Language, like the cage, wears down the wild animal in the human, ‘refining’ it, making it so tired that it must acquiesce to the rational closed economy. The confines have such a profound effect that it is inside of his cage that Red Peter discovers that he must stop being an ape if he were to find a “way out” of the cage. Finally broken, his animality tore to sheds and trembling from exhaustion, Red Peter begins to mimic the behavior of his human captors; longing not for freedom, a spacious feeling on all sides, but for a way out; “as an ape, perhaps, I knew that, and I have met men who yearn for it.” Red Peter understands that animality lays latent in the human being and that humanity wishes to return to a home of which it is frightened. Red Peter is calling to our attention that humanity craves safety, predictability, and logic, but at the cost of feeling trapped, trembling by the uncomfortability that is caused by language. Yet any trembling from the confines of language is more palatable than the fear and trembling of dwelling with the non-discursive, even though this is our true abode. Whatever anguish that language may cause, it is a feeling to which one is forced to become accustomed. Unlike the wide open non-rational depth that is one’s animality, one would rather severe a limb, living with the phantom pain, than live with the appendage of animality. The ape, Red Peter, so transformed by his acquisition of language, has to rely upon accounts for his ape-existence. Even the story of how he was captured—certainly a monumental event in his life—Red Peter must rely upon second hand accounts. One may argue that Red Peter was traumatized by this event so that he could not remember it, but if we listen further to his speech we come upon a different reason. What he experienced as an animal cannot be expressed within the constraints of language: “Of course what I felt then as an ape I can represent now only in human terms, and therefore I misrepresent it, but although I cannot reach back to the truth of the old ape life, there is no doubt that it lies somewhere in the direction I have indicated” [my emphasis]. The animal, here, is being presented in two ways: first, as pre-lingual, it is the animal that dwells in the inexpressible, inarticulate connection with being; and second, animality is never truly expunged from one’s existence, it lingers in one’s being and although inaccessible one can, nevertheless, gesture toward it; yet such an indication cannot give a true account of the experience. Animality is an experience with that which cannot be placed into discursive discourse; it is a silence that while it can be communicated “I communicate it to whoever is unaware of it.” If one wishes to reconnect to the animality within one’self, one cannot approach it with rationality and language but the silence that is appropriate for animality. What must be sought is a pre-lingual, pre-cognitive state without precondition. Thus, language is not positive faculty from the human being; it hampers one’s expression of that which lies at the heart of the human being. Indeed, should one attempt to express one’s experience with that which is most intimate to, but which is ontologically farthest, one can only do it an injustice, misrepresenting it as something that is bound by language and logic. To experience the inner depths of one’s own being one must, then, go beyond language, enter a state that does not rely upon logic and discourse. Only in such a state will one find a community that is built without the violence of naming and the rigid confines of classification. In his story, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” Kafka discusses a type of communication that is beyond words yet one that nevertheless forms a community. As if to emphasize the illogic of such an experience of this kind of communication, the narrator double backs upon himself in blatant contradictions: the mice are unmusical and yet they understand Josephine’s singing; her singing is not truly singing but only a piping; and although the piping draws the individuals together is does not truly have an effect on its listeners; is it the piping that has the effect to bring the individuals together, or is it the silence that it brings that binds the mouse folk—just to name a few. Perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of Josephine’s piping and the effect it has on her follow folk, is that piping is not usual for the mouse folk, in fact, we are told “piping is our people’s daily speech, only many a one pipes his whole life long and does not know it.” Piping unconsciously, an individual may pass one’s entire life away and yet Josephine’s piping stands out; it is the usual way of being for a mouse and at the same time it disrupts the entire consciousness of a people. We are told that this has nothing to do with the quality of her piping but instead is due to her relationship with the other mice. She is able to make a “ceremonial performance out of doing the usual thing.” Josephine we are told, “stands outside of the law” she is not held to the same standards as the rest of her folk are. She does not need to work; her energy must be spent piping not working. Her piping holds no economic value for the community, in fact we are told that she makes others work on her behalf, she disrupts the flow of the community, and her piping even attracts enemies bringing utter destruction upon her fellow mice. Nevertheless, she is protected first and foremost, given special shelter when under attack. Her very presence in the mouse community breaks all logic. Her fellow mice do not even attempt to understand Josephine for “in she makes demands it is not because of outward circumstances but because of an inner logic.” She acts spontaneously with regard to her fellows. Josephine is never fully present to her fellow mice, so she conveys an almost palpable presence in her absence that is clearly experienced by her community. The mouse folk are in constant contact with one of their own, but one of their own that is completely outside of their discourse. They can only point to her, staring in awe of her absent presence. Given her odd relationship to the community when she pipes, Josephine brings to attention what is awe-inspiring in the everydayness of mouse folk. Consequently, her power over her kin is not due to her piping but rather her status in the public. They are met face to face with their own inability to come to terms with that quality which belongs to their very being but which also transcends them: the non-rational within them. Although Josephine’s piping is that which is closest to the mouse folk because of her liminal status Josephine brings to the fore that which they mindlessly do and thus that with which they cannot rationally cope. Her piping means nothing to the populace, it is like words that are reduced to mere nonsensical utterances, and yet it nonetheless holds a power over them. This power is not a potent force; its vigor does not lie in any positive aspect but rather in a negative sense, it bestows upon the community a vacuum of meaning. The audience is allowed a certain type of access to that which they yearn for and yet cannot ever reach through themselves, it is “as if we had become partakers in the peace we long for, from which our own piping at the very least holds us back, we make no sound” [my emphasis]. Their own ‘language’ confines and defers them, but when they are confronted with the incommunicable essence of their rationality they are drawn together in the vacuum left when meaning escapes them. The piping is not a concert but rather a silent assembly of people. They stand awestruck in front of that which is most intimate to them but also inexpressible in language. She cannot be controlled; Josephine brings ruin to the people. She represents an errant quality in the heart of the community, a danger, something that must be reigned in if there is to be peace, security, and shelter, just as the animality in the human is thought to needed to governed. Yet, unlike the animality at the core of humanity, Josephine’s uniqueness is embraced in spite of the dangers, or perhaps because of them. Josephine is taken care of because of the uniqueness of her gifts. She stands in a distinctive position with regard to the others. Unlike the others, her existence cannot be reduced to exchangeability, use-value, and homogeneity; her piping we are told “is set free from the fetters of daily life and it sets us free too for a little while.” She exists within the heart of the mouse community and yet is simultaneously outside of it, is not included in it but belongs to it—she exists within a purely liminal state. Thus, because she is singular and utterly unique, everything she does holds special importance. Her music does not seek to be beautiful, “what Josephine really wants is not what she puts into words,” and is addressed to no one and yet to everyone at the same time. Stepping outside of the economic sphere, the utility-centrically driven mice are exposed to that which explodes their rational understanding. They are left in dumbfounded silence, laid bare from the power of a non-rational negative spaced. “This piping, which rises up where everyone has pledged to silence, comes almost like a message from the whole people to each individual.” The negatively imbued power arises from the community, drawing out each individual in the process to reveal the effaced uniqueness of each individual. Instead of a community built around capital, which homogenizes its citizens, through Josephine’s piping a community spontaneously grows, disseminating heterogeneity throughout, setting the mouse folk free from the fetters of daily life, placing them in a state that is both comforting and uneasy. Should we humans not feel the same contentment and community with the animal, who stands silently before of us, near us in an inarticulateable kinship? Should we not stop trying to reduce the animal to what is expressible in our language and gaze upon them in silent divine awe, in both wonderment and terror? Just as the mouse folk cannot comprehend what it is like to be Josephine and are content to commune with her precisely because of this, should we too not ask what it is like to be an animal and simply recognize them seated in our heart of hearts where we have no rational access? Does not the relationship that Josephine has with regard to the community and the negatively charged glamour of her piping correspond to the Bataillian relationship that the animal had to Paleolithic homo sapiens and their practice of sacrifice that we saw above? What the mouse folk understand that we humans do not is the inordinate desire and need for useless objects. Not everything can be reduced to a tool, and that which is is not a mere tool but can always but returned to the divine inexpressible world. If we can sacrifice the animal, tear it out of the world of human utility, thus restoring it to the realm of the divine, the human can no longer understand the animal, nor can its own animality to be subordinate to it humanity. In the end, there is no ontological foundation that must define a community or a species, since there is no ontological structure to allow such distinctions. To be confronted by that which does not belong to one’s logical framework should not compel one to force it to the nether regions of one’s world; instead one should wrestle with its illogical character, coming face to face with its disruptive character. The unintelligible eccentricity of the animality within the human that the animal forces us to encounter ought to force one to have an experience in which a fusion of subject and object, that which lies over and against the subject and the subject itself, occurs as an encounter with the unknown. It allows the agitation of reason to disperse itself on its own account. The individual is drawn into this disruption, into the vacuum of reason, where it is revealed that the self is not an isolated subject within the world, but rather a site of communication and community, blending subject and object, a blending of animality and humanity. Perhaps we can only end with a prayer to the sacrificial victim: Intimately, I belong to the sovereign world of the gods and myths, to the world of violent and uncalculated generosity, just as my wife belongs to my desires. I withdraw you, victim, from the world in which you were and could only be reduced to the condition of a thing, having a meaning that was foreign to your intimate nature. I call you back to the intimacy of the divine world, of the profound immanence of all that is. Bibliography

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