Before the Law

Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame

Cary Wolfe

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780226922416, 9780226922409
• eBook ISBN: 9780226922423
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Animal studies and biopolitics are two of the most dynamic areas of interdisciplinary scholarship, but until now, they have had little to say to each other. Bringing these two emergent areas of thought into direct conversation in Before the Law, Cary Wolfe fosters a new discussion about the status of nonhuman animals and the shared plight of humans and animals under biopolitics.

 

Wolfe argues that the human­­­-animal distinction must be supplemented with the central distinction of biopolitics: the difference between those animals that are members of a community and those that are deemed killable but not murderable. From this understanding, we can begin to make sense of the fact that this distinction prevails within both the human and animal domains and address such difficult issues as why we afford some animals unprecedented levels of care and recognition while subjecting others to unparalleled forms of brutality and exploitation. Engaging with many major figures in biopolitical thought—from Heidegger, Arendt, and Foucault to Agamben, Esposito, and Derrida—Wolfe explores how biopolitics can help us understand both the ethical and political dimensions of the current questions surrounding the rights of animals.

Notes

SECTION ONE

1. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” trans. William Lovitt, in Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. and intro. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 302.

2. Ibid., 287, 294.

3. As David Wills aptly summarizes it, Gestell “is coined in the context of two other words, namely Gebirge, the gathering of mountains that produces the mountain ‘range,’ and Gemut, the gathering of emotions that produces a ‘disposition.’ In comparison with a natural gathering on the one hand and human gathering on the other, Gestell will be the frameworking of what is set out, produced by and in the same movement ordered into instrumental service.” David Wills, Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 30.

4. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 309.

5. Ibid., 308.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., 299.

8. Ibid., 310.

9. Ibid., 300.

10. Ibid., 294.

11. For as Timothy Campbell points out, the decisive question here is this: “What kind of man masters technology? The change in the species of man that attempts to extend his domination over technology . . . is in fact what is most dangerous about technology.” Timothy Campbell, Improper Life: Technology and Bioopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 7.

12. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” trans. Frank A. Capuzzi and J. Glenn Gray, in Heidegger, Basic Writings, 200.

13. See Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory, foreword W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), chap. 2. As Heidegger puts it in the “Letter,” “man is not only a living creature who possesses language along with other capacities. Rather, language is the house of Being in which man ek-sists by dwelling, in that he belongs to the truth of Being, guarding it.” Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 213.

14. Campbell, Improper Life, 28.

15. Throughout this essay, I roughly alternate between the more technically correct term “nonhuman animal” and the more concise and felicitous term “animal,” it being obvious that Homo sapiens is but one member of the animal kingdom—and a member who has often sought to maintain that the “human” is not.

16. For Derrida’s discussion of “ipseity,” see Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 143, and Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 71. The canonical locus for the discussion of “bare life” in Agamben is his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

17. See Jacques Derrida, “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand,” trans. John P. Leavey Jr., in Deconstruction and Philosophy, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 173.

18. Jacques Derrida, “The Parergon,” trans. Craig Owens, October 9 (Summer 1979): 33. As Wills notes, Gestell is a kind of technology through which the human paradoxically reveals its essential, pretechnological, ontological nature to itself only on the basis of its prosthetic dependence on something external, technical, inorganic (Wills, Dorsality, 34).

19. See Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (London: Polity Press, 2011), 7.

20. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed., intro. Margaret Conovan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 2.

21. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, new ed. (New York: Harcourt, 1976), 302.

22. Ibid., 292. For an incisive discussion of this moment in Arendt, see Alistair Hunt, “The Rights of the Infinite,” in Qui Parle 19, no. 2 (Spring / Summer 2011): 223–51.

23. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 30. See also Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 56. On “bare life,” see Agamben, Homo Sacer.

24. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 295–96.

25. Ibid., 296–97.

26. As Arendt writes in her overview of the idea of politics inherited from the Greeks, in a passage whose direct lines of descent to Heidegger’s humanism are clear enough, and in one of the great articulations of the biopolitical distinction between bios and zoe before Foucault, “The distinction between man and animal runs right through the human species itself: only the best (aristoi), who constantly prove themselves to be the best (aristeuein, a verb for which there is no equivalent in any other language) and who ‘prefer immortal fame to mortal things,’ are really human; the others, content with whatever pleasures nature will yield them, live and die like animals” (The Human Condition, 19; see also 13, 24, 37).

27. See in particular her discussion of what she calls, in quotation marks, the “‘language’ of mathematical symbols” versus language proper, which partakes of the topos we have already discussed in Heidegger of the improper versus proper use relation to language as mere communication, information, in contrast to authentic expression and comprehension (Arendt, The Human Condition, 3–4). See also her Origins of Totalitarianism, 297.

28. Arendt, The Human Condition, 3; see also 27.

29. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 300.

30. See Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278–94.

31. As she writes in the prologue to The Human Condition, “wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being” (Arendt, The Human Condition, 4; emphasis added). So speech is “natural” but, regarding its function as a foundation for rights, it may be either relevant or irrelevant. Indeed, as she notes in discussing Aristotle’s political writings, “according to this opinion, everybody outside the polis—slaves and barbarians—was aneu logou, deprived, of course, not of the faculty of speech, but of a way of life in which speech and only speech made sense and where the central concern of all citizens was to talk with each other” (ibid., 27; emphasis added). All of the foregoing clarifies why Hunt is not quite right when he says of Arendt that “insofar as the right to have rights is claimed by those reduced to a condition of rightlessness, perhaps the author of The Human Condition, one of the most magnificent humanist treatises of the twentieth century, is in her own way also an advocate of animal rights” (Hunt, “The Rights of the Infinite,” 225). The right to have rights would be barred to nonhuman animals because it rests on the foundation of the capacity for speech.

32. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 27–29.

33. “If it belonged to everyone,” Esposito continues, “like a biological characteristic, language or the ability to walk, for example, a right would not be a right, but simply a fact with no need for specific juridical denomination. In the same way, if the category of person coincided with that of human being, there would have been no need for it. Ever since its original juridical performance, personhood is valuable exactly to the extent to which it is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• V
• VI
• VII
• VIII
• Notes
• Index