Joanna Paddock
(0901164)
CSCT 767
Prof. David Clark
November 29, 2009
Half-Buried Dog Response: Heidegger and the Death of the Animal
What strikes me first when looking at Goya’s painting, “Half-Buried Dog”, is
the similar representation of both the dog and the earth: the colouring is so
homogenous that at first glance I was unable to actually locate the dog. This leads me
to wonder what role the dog plays in Goya’s world, and what importance, or to what
extent importance is attached to this animal. By the title that is attributed to the work
(“The Half-Buried Dog”), it is implied that the dog is in distress, close to death, or in
some sort of danger. However, to have such an important occurrence, the potential
loss of life, be relegated to the near-background of a painting leads me to wonder how
the depiction of the object would be altered in terms of shading or colouring had the
object of the painting been human. Goya’s painting reproduces a Heideggarian
understanding of the animal. Using both Cavalieri and Agamben’s presentations of
Heidegger’s work, I argue that this painting reproduces Heidegger’s assertion that the
animal cannot experience death.
For Heidegger, the animal is primarily differentiated from the human by virtue
of its relation to the world. The animal is poor-in-the-world, while the man is worldforming (Agamben, 51). This poverty is with regard to the animal’s mode of being,
where the animal is captured within its disinhibitor, in which “…the animal cannot
truly act (handeh) or comport itself (sich verhalten) in relation to it: it can only
behave (sich benehmen)” (Heidegger in Agamben, 52). The animal is part of the
world. It is enmeshed or entrenched in it. The animal simply is.
This understanding of the animal has important implications for Heidegger’s
dismissal of the possibility of an animal’s death. If the animal merely exists within its
environment, he says, it does not experience death, but merely perishes (Cavalieri,
11). The death of an animal is thus nothing more than another event in nature,
unextraodinary and uninteresting. Through the representation of the animal as being
homogenous to the world surrounding it, Goya’s painting reinforces Heidegger’s
assertion that the animal is captive within its environment, which removes the
significance of its death.
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2004. Print.
Cavalieri, Paola. The Death of the Animal: A Dialogue. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2009. Print.