becoming animal

When Elizabeth Costello mentions Thomas Nagel’s essay “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” I couldn’t help but be reminded of the experiential learning exercises we conduct in class and how we attempt to view the world from the eyes of our spirit animal. In this lecture, Costello draws an important distinction. Instead of merely being an imagining of how a bat lives, “what we really aspire to know is what it is like to be a bat, as a bat is a bat; and that we can never accomplish because our minds are inadequate to the task – our minds are not bats’ minds” (Coetzee 76). I can associate this with my own experiences trying to learn from the spirit energy of the Mantis. Rather than merely learning from the behavioral tendencies of the Mantis, I instead attempt to empathize with what it is like to exist as a Mantis. In this way, I am drawing lessons from the Mantis’s Being. Wendy Doniger also notes that Nagel was not the first to propose this type of empathic imagination. “Xenophanes, an ancient Greek philosopher, said, “If cattle and horses or lions had hands, or could draw with their feet, horses would draw the forms of god like horses” (519). Many consider this line of thinking the inspiration of Deleuze and Guattari’s recent writings on identity, who argue that “nonidentity is not a deprivation, not a negative, but a form of micropolitics whose structure is molecular, where nonidentity is difference in itself unrelated to the bipolarity (the “bipolar machine”) of identity/difference” (Bruns 713). This seems equally reminiscent of Ram Dass’s advocacy of a nomadic Self that can respond to multiple instances of suffering. Clearly these instances of empathy have also been proposed by other thinkers, giving greater weight to their validity. One can’t help but see similarities between the arguments presented by Costello and Xenophanes and the type of ethical exercises we conduct in Bump’s class.

deleuze and guattari advocate a form of intellectual nomadism where we can 'become animal'

David Sztybel’s analysis of the comparison between the treatment of animals and the holocaust was also remarkably provocative. Sztybel refutes the argument that comparing slaughterhouses with Auschwitz trivializes the holocaust in an interesting manner. Sztybel proposes an ethical framework where all lives are viewed equally, thereby justifying this comparison through a utilitarian calculus. He says, “We kill approximately five billion mammals and birds annually in the United States alone” (549). It is worth noting that this is “many times the number of women and people of color in the United States” in order to draw a comparison between different political goals that the Left pursues in the public sphere (549). Most fascinating is the decision to seize a utilitarian calculus, which is so often used to justify the experimentation upon animals to help the human race generally. Instead of opponents of animal rights being able to use utilitarianism to justify their positions, animal ethicists are able to seize utilitarianism for their own political goals.

Gerald Bruns. “Becoming-animal (Some Simple Ways)”. New Literary History 38.4. 2007. Pages 703-720.