Konturen: Vol 6 (2014)
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Defining the Human and the Animal
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Item access-status.open.access.listelement.badge Introduction: Defining the Human and the Animal(University of Oregon, 2014) Mathäs, AlexanderItem access-status.open.access.listelement.badge The Time of Animal Voices(University of Oregon, 2014) Toadvine, TedPhenomenology’s attention to the theme of animality has focused not on animal life in general but rather on the animal dimension of the human and its contested relation with humanity as such. Phenomenology thereby reproduces Agamben’s “anthropological machine” by which humanity is constructed through the “inclusive exclusion” of its animality. The alternative to this “inclusive exclusion” is not, however, a return to kinship or commonality, but rather an intensification of the constitutive paradox of our own inner animality, understood in terms of the anonymous, corporeal subject of perception that lives a different temporality than that of first-person consciousness. This provides us with an entirely different context for encounter with non-human others, insofar as they speak through our own voices and gaze out through our own eyes. This position is developed through a reading, first, of the proximity of Merleau-Ponty’s early work with that of Max Scheler, who paradigmatically reduces human animality to bare life. Merleau-Ponty differentiates himself from Scheler by emphasizing, in The Structure of Behavior, that life cannot be integrated into spirit without remainder. Merleau-Ponty’s later work thinks this remainder as the ineliminable gap and delay in the auto-affection of the body and as a chiasmic exchange that anticipates Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming animal.” This remainder of life within consciousness is the immemorial past of one’s own animality. It follows that our “inner animality” is neither singular nor plural but a kind of pack that speaks through the voice that I take to be mine. Furthermore, in the exchange of looks between myself and a non-human other, the crossing of glances occurs at an animal level that withdraws from my own reflective consciousness.Item access-status.open.access.listelement.badge Organisms and Objectifications: A Historical-Materialist Inquiry into the "Human and Animal"(University of Oregon, 2014) Fracchia, JosephIn order to respond to the problem addressed by this volume, I must reformulate its title, “Defining the Human and Animal”, by replacing the conjunctive 'and' with 'as'. Because this essay is based on the not too far-fetched assumption that Homo sapiens is an animal species, it addresses the question of defining the human as animal. To do so, it takes its cue from an offhand, never systematically elaborated statement by Karl Marx that, by taking the body seriously, situates human beings in the animal world, namely: “The first fact to be established for historical theory is human corporeal organization” (and fully in keeping with Marx’s—and Darwin’s—logic, that the same is true for the history of all species). The way in which any organism, humans included, negotiates, inhabits, and transforms its world is inextricably linked to its corporeal organization. Accordingly, rather than attempt to define the human and animal, my concern is with the question of the relation between an organism’s corporeal organization and the history of its ‘objectifications’, that is, how each organism, Homo sapiens included, makes worlds in its own bodily image. This historical-materialist inquiry into the ‘Human as Animal’ will therefore be developed in two parts. This essay will first outline historical materialism as a corporeal turn by situating it in relation to the mainstream of the Western philosophical tradition and to Darwin’s materialist conception of natural history. Then, through an elaboration of the concept of Vergegenständlichung/objectification, it will consider history as world-making – a labor common to all organisms, but certainly unique in Homo sapiens.Item access-status.open.access.listelement.badge Rationality, Animality, and Human Nature: Reconsidering Kant's View of the Human/Animal Relation(University of Oregon, 2014) Craig, DavidKant is often criticized for his strict separation of humans and animals as categorically distinct entities. This separation hinges on the fact that, for Kant, humans are rational, while non-human animals are wholly irrational. This essay argues that a strict separation of rational humanity and irrational animality, prominent in many areas of Kant's thinking, does not characterize his view of the human/animal relation overall. For, within Kant's theory of human nature, rationality and animality are in fact entwined, with both contributing to the goodness and full realization of human life. Through engagement with a range of Kant's writings on human nature, it is suggested that Kant's view of the human/animal relation merits reconsideration by Kant scholars and animal-oriented philosophers alike.Item access-status.open.access.listelement.badge Of Non-vital Interest: Art, Mimicry, and the Phenomenon of Life(University of Oregon, 2014) Calhoon, Kenneth S.My aim in this essay is to explore certain parallels—concerning anthropomorphism—in the work of Roger Caillois, Hans Jonas, Theodor Adorno and Sigmund Freud. Both Caillois (a thinker closely connected to French Surrealism and an important source for Jacques Lacan) and Jonas (philosopher and one-time student of Heidegger) take issue with the ban on anthropomorphism—an anathema that is the legacy of Western science. Part of the thesis in Jonas’ major work, The Phenomenon of Life, is that freedom is not exclusively a human quality but a potential within the simplest organic forms, even within inorganic matter. Anthropomorphism may be the legacy of a primitive stage in human development in which the whole of creation was endowed with a soul, but this attitude, Jonas argues, is the more natural one. Whereas in the early phases of humanity death was the stranger in a world that was fundamentally alive, modern thinking made life the riddle within a world of neutral matter and mechanistic principles. Freud’s own theory of the death-drive (“an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces”) seems quite consistent with the primacy of death over life instituted by modern thought. I have a general interest in comparing Freud’s theory of the death drive, the aim of which is the restoration of an original equilibrium, with music, whose traditional structure (via the cadence) is to relieve tonal tension through a restoration of the keynote (Grundton). This bears upon the problem of anthropomorphism in that “classical” music since the seventeenth century has cast expression in terms of simulated human emotions: we hear music and perceive love, longing or fear, not to mention (in the case of pastorale) the “cheer” of birdsong or the “rage” of a thunderstorm. Adorno’s critique of this tradition, in which true expression is replaced by mere images of expression, theorizes what he calls a “tendency of the material,” extolling the composer whose sheer mastery of technique enables the material to go where it “wants” to go. What Adorno means by “material” is not merely the inventory of sounds available to the musician but the historical experience sedimented within musical convention. Nonetheless, I would like to attempt an argument whose parameters are Adorno’s “tendency of the material” and Jonas’ idea that freedom must be conceived as a “genuine potency” within physical substance.Item access-status.open.access.listelement.badge Ascent, Descent, and Divergence: Darwin and Haeckel on the Human Family Tree(University of Oregon, 2014) Gliboff, SanderIn their pathbreaking discussions of the human family tree in the 1860s and 1870s, Ernst Haeckel and Charles Darwin had to account for both the ascent of the species and its diversification into races. But what was the cause and the pattern of diversification, and when did it begin? Did we attain a common humanity first, which all the races still share? Or did we split up as apes and have to find our own separate and perhaps not equivalent ways to become human? Using texts and images from their principal works, this essay recovers Haeckel’s and Darwin’s views on these points, relates them to the monogenist-polygenist debate, and compares them to Alfred Russel Wallace’s 1864 attempt at a compromise.Item access-status.open.access.listelement.badge The Humanity of Children from Sandmann to Struwwelpeter: A Tale of Two Hoffmanns(University of Oregon, 2014) Hart, GailWithin the context of an inquiry into the borders between human and animal, this essay considers the question of the humanity - or animality - of children as they are depicted in nineteenth-century German literature and elsewhere. Defining nineteenth-century literary "humanity" as a regulating, domesticating, bourgeoisification, I examine E.T.A. Hoffman's Der Sandmann and Heinrich Hoffmann's Der Struwwelpeter, and follow the sins of omission (Sandmann) and comission (Struwwelpeter) that seem to authorize the inhuman treatment of children. Nathanael, Coppelius's "little beast," is reduced both to beast and automaton/wooden doll and ultimately destroyed in E.T.A. Hoffmann's adult novella. Twenty-nine years later, the young protagonists of Heinrich Hoffmann's children's book suffer gruesome punishments for their willful transgression of bourgeois norms and domestic law. But the children's rhymes produced in 1845 have a revolutionary flavor that underscores the subject's freedom.Item access-status.open.access.listelement.badge The Feminine Beast: Anti-moral Moralist in Early 20th-Century Literature(University of Oregon, 2014) Ostmeier, DorotheeTexts of the early Twentieth Century link animalism, gender struggles, and issues of identity in their stark critique of bourgeois gender ideology. This essay places selected texts by Bertolt Brecht and Frank Wedekind in the center of this debate as they elaborate on Friedrich Nietzche's critique of the Western nature/culture divide and his animal imagery. For Brecht, corruption of bourgeois value systems, including gender concepts, undermines any possibility for an authentic lifestyle, whereas Wedekind - a generation earlier - explores the corruptibility of authenticity itself.Item access-status.open.access.listelement.badge From Anti-humanism to Post-humanism: Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf(University of Oregon, 2014) Mathäs, AlexanderHermann Hesse's Steppenwolf (1927) can be regarded as a post-humanist novel for several reasons. It is post-humanist in a temporal sense because it engages with the nineteenth-century humanist legacy from a twentieth-century perspective. The novel's brazen critique of traditional bourgeois values does not simply reject humanism and its philosophy of individual autonomy. It dislodges idealist concepts of wholeness and self-perfection and replaces them with a multi-perspectival view of a continuously changing human consciousness, an open-ended process toward and ever-elusive self-awareness. The protagonist of Hesse's novel, Harry Haller, even though still heavily influenced by the humanist tradition, can no longer be viewed as a clearly defined individual personifying the Cartesian dichotomy of body and mind. On the contrary, Hesse's novel depicts Haller's gradual disillusionment with this idealist world view by giving a detailed account of the deconstruction of his personality - a personality that, as it turns out, does not consist of a spiritual essence but dissolves into an accumulation of acquired conventions, habits, cultural and philosophical traditions, even specific historical events and constellations. Yet Hesse's attempt to go beyond a mere negation of humanist values implies transcending the humanist paradigm in many respects, including its form. This essay will focus on the novel’s subversion of the humanist tradition. It discloses how Hesse’s novel undermines universalist philosophical claims, regardless of whether they belong to the idealist or anti-idealist Nietzschean philosophy that heavily influenced both the protagonist and his author. In light of the novel’s dismantling of binary reasoning, foregrounded in the protagonist’s man-animal division, the essay challenges conventional wisdom among critics who regard Hesse’s literary works as traditionalist.