Christine Garlough
University of Wisconsin Madison
Department of Gender and Women’s Studies
Beyond The Monkey Show
Giorgio Agamben begins The Open: Man and Animal by describing a thirteenth
century Hebrew Bible in the Ambrosian Library in Milan that is illustrated with scenes of
mystic inspiration. Of particular interest to Agamben is a depiction of the messianic
banquet of the righteous on the last day. What he finds intriguing about this miniature
are the faces beneath the crowns of the righteous – faces that are not human faces.
Rather, the guests at the table possess eschatological animal heads, including the lion, ox,
and eagle, as well as the grotesque features of the leopard and ass. These guests are
entertained by musicians, some of whom also are represented with animal heads. As
Agamben draws attention to a fiddler, portrayed with a monkey’s face, he asks the reader
what we might make of this scene that depicts the concluded history of humanity through
figures of the beast. He suggests that this messianic banquet might allude to a different
economy of relations between animal and human. He asks, is it possible that on the last
day the relations between animals and men might be reinvented such that man will be
reconciled with his animal nature? Perhaps.
And yet, for those of us attending this conference, an equally important question
might be what are the political and/or ethical implications of retaining the rhetorically
assigned distinction between human and animal?” To be sure, such debates surrounding
the value of the distinction between animal and human remain a central concern for
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scholars in a diverse range of disciplines, including philosophy, rhetoric, and
anthropology. Most generally, these deliberations call attention to the anthropomorphic
institution of privileging the human order over the animal order. In response, some, like
Agamben, argue that the animal-human distinction should be forsaken due to its role in
the functioning of the anthropological machine. Others, like Derrida, contend that binary
oppositions between human beings and animals are not only empirically inaccurate but
overlook the various differences we observe among animals and human beings
themselves.
Or, perhaps under close consideration we will not find a group of beings that share a
common “animality” but a heterogeneous series of beings and relationships. Here, we
see a relational ontology of singularities, “one that is informed as much by Nietzschean
and Deleuzean materialism as by Heideggerian and Levinasian phenomenology”
(Calarco). From this perspective, human beings belong to a multiplicity of beings and
relations. As such, they are not exempt from the play of differences and becomings.
They move relentlessly along a series of differences: human from animal, animal from
plant, and life from death. Perhaps then, if we want to focus on the world of becomingwith, ultimately, it is these patterns of relationality that need to be reconsidered, rather
than getting beyond one troubled category of woman or human (Haraway).
With regard to ethics and politics, this matters if we wish to develop a notion of life
as responsibility – an inclusive sense of life that embraces human, animal, and beyond.
We might ask, what would it mean, following Derrida, to problematize the
anthropocentric foundations of philosophy, rhetoric, and related discourses; a pattern
apparent even in the work of critics such as Emmanuel Levinas? What are the stakes of
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attempting to distinguish human beings from animals by focusing upon traits often
considered distinctively human such as the hand, nudity or the awareness of death? And
what about suffering?
Derrida, drawing from Bentham, argues that the first and most critical question is to
know whether animals can suffer. This, in turn, leads him to the virtue of pity. (Calarco,
100-106). In doing so, he calls attention to the embodied exposure of animals, their
finitude and vulnerability. When we reflect upon animals’ inability to avoid pain or
exposure to wounding, we also reflect upon our own mortality and the agony of this
vulnerability. This, perhaps, leads us to the experience of compassion and
acknowledgment. This experience is at the very core of the question of ethics – it
involves not mere kindness but justice and requires an alternative conception of ethics to
what we find in the liberal justice and rights tradition of analytical philosophy.
And yet, despite my sense that suffering is what calls us toward diminishing the
conceptual divide between animal and human, I am not (at this moment) willing to give
up this rhetorical distinction. Rather, I am interested to explore the ethical potential of
play within the “violence” of such categories. I believe, that is, that the distinction itself when we are not clutching at it – can be a very productive one both politically and
ethically. This notion of “clutching,” well developed in the writings of Wolfe and Cavell,
asks us to consider what happens when we deny “the standoffishness of objects” by
clutching at them; which is to say when we conceive of thinking as the application of
judgments. “The opposite of clutching is facing the fact that the demand for unity in our
judgments, that our deployment of concepts, is not the expression of the conditionedness
or limitation of our humanness but of the human effort to escape our humanness”
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(Wolfe). A refusal of clutching is, instead, a kind of thinking as welcoming which
belongs to the essence of the gift.
So, perhaps we should revisit the question of “What are the political and/or ethical
implications of retaining the rhetorically assigned distinction between human and
animal?” Might we reflect upon the ways that critical play within this distinction
provides unique opportunities to explore many ways of being and becoming. Through
movements between both refusal and acceptance, this distinction becomes something for
human thought “through being taken up and made something of – by generations of
human beings, in their practices, their art, their literature, their art, their religion”
(Diamond). Moreover, it moves us toward experiencing and acknowledging the
difficulties of reality. What is unknowable? What is unspeakable? What is suffering?
What is uncanny and how might we be moved to wonder by the strangeness – the
strangeness of the humans among whom we live, as well as animals and other beings too
(Haraway). It opens us toward asking what it means to speak of/with/to the (radically)
Other. These philosophical questions serve us well as we seek to engage ethically in
grounded ways with the world around us.
By way of conclusion, and with a nod backward to Agamben’s initial exploration of
monkeys and fiddles, I would like to invoke an interesting nonwestern example of critical
play with the rhetorical distinctions between animal and human. During my fieldwork
with grassroots feminist groups in Baroda, Gujarat, I came to know of a street play titled
The Monkey Show. The play, written in colloquial Gujarati and performed in local
courtyards, alleyways, and community centers, explores the violence associated with
gender inequalities and domestic abuse through the marriage of two unlikely protagonists
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– monkey newlyweds. As the plot develops, the potential for suffering and violence
within the institution of marriage is explored. The play concludes with the male monkey
being enjoined by the human chorus to increase his financial assets by committing
“dowry murder” and then finding a new bride. After a pregnant pause, the monkey
refuses on the grounds that are there are some things even animals will not do to one
another. What, indeed, might be human in animal nature?
Readings Referenced:
Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2004.
Calarco, Mathew. Zoographies. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
Calarco, Matthew and Peter Atterton. Eds. Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in
Continental Thought. New York: Continuum, 2004.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Translated by
David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28 (Winter 2002): 369-418.
---. Aporias: Dying—Awaiting (One Another at) the Limits of Truth. Translated by
Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.
---. “Violence Against Animals.” In Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco. For What
Tomorrow? Translated by Jeff Fort. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.
Hansen, Beatrice. Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings,
and Angels. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
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