Animals and Animality Across the Humanities and Social Sciences
Queen's University, Kingston, Canada.
26-27 June 2010
“Animal Witness, Animal Testament; or, Who was ‘the last Kantian in Nazi Germany?’”
[Abstract]
David L. Clark
Department of English and Cultural Studies
McMaster University
Professor David L. Clark’s keynote address will explore the question of human understandings of
and obligations towards non-human life. What is an “animal”? Can an animal speak…or be
heard? In his later work, Jacques Derrida asks what it means to be addressed by an animal, and
to fall under its gaze. How is philosophy unnerved and unseated in the presence of animal
others? Professor Clark’s lecture begins with this irrepressible question, but shifts the focus from
the animal gaze to the complex roles that animal’s play and are made to play as witness—in
particular, as witness to atrocity. In the wake of atrocities, how do animals act as testamentary
remnants, speaking transitively of unregarded deaths and useless suffering? How does an animal
testament make irrefutable demands on the present and on the future? In order to pose these
questions, Professor Clark’s divides his remarks into two movements. After Derrida, he sketches
out a project that explores the animal "gaze" in philosophical modernity, briefly evoking a series
of telling examples from Descartes to Kant to Cixous. He then discusses two extraordinary
instances of the animal testament, each set in the awful shadow of the Holocaust. Professor Clark
returns to Emmanuel Levinas's autobiographical account of his incarceration in a slave labour
camp, where he encounters “Bobby,” the little dog he describes as “the last Kantian in Nazi
Germany.” How is Levinas’s ambivalence regarding the animal symptomatic of the complexities
swirling around the once and future witness? Characterizing Levinas’s account as an incomplete
work of mourning, Professor Clark then turns to rare film footage of the murder of Latvian Jews
at the hands of the SS Einsatzgruppen. A little dog who dashes across the frame of this dreadful
archival record from 1941 raises difficult questions about the animal witness and the animal
testament. How do these animals tell a story whose history we have not yet exhausted?