becoming undone

DARWINIAN REFLECTIONS ON LIFE, POLITICS, AND ARTBy ELIZABETH GROSZ

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5053-8

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………….viiIntroduction………………………………………………………………………….11. The Inhuman in the Humanities: Darwin and the Ends of Man……………………………….112. Deleuze, Bergson, and the Concept of Life……………………………………………..263. Bergson, Deleuze, and Difference……………………………………………………..404. Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom……………………………………………………595. The Future of Feminist Theory: Dreams for New Knowledges………………………………..746. Differences Disturbing Identity: Deleuze and Feminism…………………………………..887. Irigaray and the Ontology of Sexual Difference…………………………………………998. Darwin and the Split between Natural and Sexual Selection……………………………….1159. Sexual Difference as Sexual Selection: Irigarayan Reflections on Darwin…………………..14310. Art and the Animal…………………………………………………………………16911. Living Art and the Art of Life: Women’s Painting from the Western Desert…………………187Notes………………………………………………………………………………..203Bibliography………………………………………………………………………….245Index………………………………………………………………………………..255

Chapter One

The Inhuman in the Humanities

DARWIN AND THE ENDS OF MAN

In truth, there are only inhumanities, humans are made exclusively of inhumanities, but very different ones, of very different natures and speeds. —GILLES DELEUZE AND FÉLIX GUATTARI, A Thousand Plateaus

Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience. It is a process that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the livable and the lived. —GILLES DELEUZE, “Literature and Life,” Essays Critical and Clinical

The place of the animal and the inhuman in our conceptions of the human, and their possible role in the humanities, those disciplines and interdisciplines devoted to the study of humans and their cultural and expressive relations, will be my object of exploration here. I want to discuss what is before, beyond, and after the human: the inhuman, uncontainable condition of the human, the origin of and trajectory immanent within the human. In asking about the inhuman—the animal, plant, and material forces that surround and overtake the human—I am not asking a new question but merely continuing a tradition that resurfaced in the final decade of the twentieth century as an echo of the Nietzschean lament for the all-too-human. Not only do Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari address the question of becoming-animal by examining the writings of Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson; Jacques Derrida makes the animal, animals, and the relations of animality to the human, the object of interrogation in his final book, The Animal That Therefore I Am, and Giorgio Agamben places the animal at the center of his reflections on man as political being.

The animal has returned to haunt the conceptual aura of the humanities, those disciplines that have affirmed and even constituted themselves as beyond the animal. The animal is a necessary reminder of the limits of the human, its historical and ontological contingency; of the precariousness of the human as a state of being, a condition of sovereignty, or an ideal of self-regulation. The animal is that from which the human tentatively and precariously emerges; the animal is that inhuman destination to which the human always tends. The animal surrounds the human at both ends: it is the origin and the end of humanity.

There is an intangible and elusive line that has divided the animal from the human since ancient Greece, if not long before, by creating a boundary, an oppositional structure, that denies to the animal what it grants to the human as a power or ability: whether it is reason, language, thought, consciousness, or the ability to dress, to bury, to mourn, to invent, to control fire, or one of the many other qualities that has divided man from animal. This division—constitutive of the humanities as they developed from the nineteenth century onward—has cast man on the other side of the animals. Philosophy has attributed to man a power that animals lack (and often that women, children, slaves, foreigners, and others also lack: the alignment of the most abjected others with animals is ubiquitous). What makes man human is the power of reason, of speech, of response, of shame, and so on that animals lack. Man must be understood as fundamentally different from and thus as other to the animal; an animal perhaps, but one with at least one added category—a rational animal, an upright animal, an embarrassed animal—that lifts it out of the categories of all other living beings and marks man’s separateness, his distance, his movement beyond the animal. As traditionally conceived, philosophy, from the time of Plato to that of Ren?Descartes, affirmed man’s place as a rational animal, a speaking animal, a conscious animal, an animal perhaps in body but a being other and separated from animals through mind. These Greek and Cartesian roots have largely structured the ways in which contemporary philosophy functions through the relegation of the animal to man’s utter other, an other bereft of humanity. (Derrida affirms the continuity that links the Greeks and Descartes to the work of phenomenological and psychoanalytic theory running through the texts of Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Lacan.) This more or less continuous tradition is sorely challenged and deeply compromised by the eruption of Darwinism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Philosophy has yet to recover from this eruption, has yet to recompose its concepts of man, reason, and consciousness to accommodate the Darwinian explosion that, according to Sigmund Freud, produced one of the three major assaults that science provided as antidote to man’s narcissism. The first, the Copernican revolution, demonstrated that the earth circulates the sun, and the third, the Freudian revolution, demonstrated that consciousness is not master of itself. But the second of these assaults, the Darwinian revolution, demonstrated that man descended from animals and remains still animal, and was perhaps a more profound insult to mankind’s sense of self than the other two. Derrida understands that Darwin’s is perhaps the greatest affront, the one that has been least accommodated in contemporary thought.

Darwin in the Humanities

I want to explore Darwin’s place in the humanities and the implications his work has for the ways in which the human is conceived. It is his conception of animals and plants, the world of the living—which equally incorporates the animal, the vegetal, and the human alongside protozoa, bacteria, and viruses—that has yet to fully impact the humanities, though it has, highly selectively and often problematically, dominated the biological sciences. It is perhaps more than appropriate today to reevaluate Darwin’s conception of the descent of man and to explore what it means for philosophies of man and of life that might develop in Darwin’s wake. What would a humanities, a knowledge of and for the human, look like if it placed the animal in its rightful place, not only before the human but also within and after the human? What is the trajectory of a newly considered humanities, one that seeks to know itself not in opposition to its others, the “others” of the human, but in continuity with them? What would a humanities look like that does not rely on an opposition between self and other, in which the other is always in some way associated with animality or the nonhuman? What kind of intellectual revolution would be required to make man, and the various forms of man, one among many living things, and one force among many, rather than the aim and destination of all knowledges, not only the traditional disciplines within the humanities, but also the newer forms of interdisciplinarity?

What would the study of, for example, literature and language which did not privilege the human as its paradigm look like? Is it possible for us to understand, say, language differently, beyond and outside the limits of the human? Could there be an ethology of language? Or of expression? Ironically, in view of the common misinterpretation of Derrida as someone who focuses primarily on discourse, this is one of the central questions that Derrida asks of the tradition of modern philosophy since Descartes: what would a theory of language, signification, or the trace look like that did not, through logocentric techniques, privilege not only the human but a particular kind of (European, masculine, upright, and erect carnivorous—a carnophallologocentric) subject and discourse? What would a theory of language be like that understood language in its full resonance as trace, as the material and incorporeal incision that marks and hides its own movement, a trace that in no way privileges the voice or speech? Isn’t such an ethology precisely what Derrida has searched for as a language beyond logocentrism, a language that is trace in all its complexity? And isn’t language that erupts from the animal already a language beyond the signifier, such as Deleuze seeks, a language linked not only to the signification of what is absent, but a language that acts and transforms, more amenable to a pragmatism than a linguistics? We see the glimmer of a possibility of a new humanities in which languages of all kinds, languages in all the stages of their elaboration, from the glorious rhythmic dancing of bees to the pheromonal impulses of ants (as I will discuss in chapter 10), do not culminate in human languages but include them as one means among many for the linguistic elaboration of life.

How open-endedly must we understand language, representation, and art—those qualities that we have up to now relegated to the human only to the extent that they are denied to the animal—if we are to problematize the opposition between animal and human, and fully immerse the human in the worlds of the animal? What is distinctively human in the humanities if man is again, in the light of Darwin’s rearrangement of the universe, placed in the context of animals and animal-becomings? These questions resonate with our perilous identity and ask us to address the future destinations of man, man after mankind, man in the wake of the Overman, the human at the moment of its dissipation and beyond. What would the humanities, a knowledge of the posthuman, be like far in the future, after mankind has evolved beyond man? What are the limits of knowing, the limits of relevance, of the humanities? This is not simply the question of how we might include the animal, incorporate it into the human, as some contemporary animal rights philosophies imply. It is more to ask the question: what is the limit of the humanities? Beyond which points must it be forced to transform itself into new forms of knowledge, given its inability to accommodate the full range of humanity let alone the inhuman forms of life that surround and enable the human?

Perhaps this is another way of asking: at what point do the humanities find themselves inevitably connected to the natural sciences? And at what point is it that the sciences find that they need another framework or perspective from which to understand their various objects of investigation, not from outside, as they tend to do, but from within, as the humanities attempt? In other words, if man is understood, following Darwin, as one among many animals, not as a rational animal who has what other animals lack, but an animal who has perhaps in different degrees of development what may also be viewed in undeveloped form in other animals, degrees of tendency, then perhaps we may understand that the natural sciences, even as they may be augmented by the social sciences, nevertheless remain unable to grasp the qualitative nuances that only the humanities—each in their different ways—address. The humanities each address, without clear-cut borders, the human as a literary, linguistic, artistic, philosophical, historical, and culturally variable being. They remain irreplaceable to the extent that these questions have not been and perhaps cannot be addressed through other knowledges. However, they are not invariable, and each discipline is subjected to more or less frequent upheavals, transformations, and reassessments that are themselves historically and culturally regulated.

Darwin understood the extent to which man has ordered the natural world according to his own various interests: “If man had not been his own classifier, he would never have thought of founding a separate order for his own reception.” This seems remarkably close to Derrida’s claim: “Animal is a word that men have given themselves the right to give. These humans are found giving it to themselves, this word, but as if they had received it as an inheritance.” The sciences as much as the humanities require other perspectives than those which have dictated what counts as human, what categories of human are classified as borderline, less than human, or already on the animal-side of the human.

This question of what constitutes the human is one of the most intense and fraught questions of the modern era. It constitutes the center of feminist, antiracist, and class-based struggles. These struggles have been elaborated around precisely the question of who to include or exclude when characterizing the human. What Darwin’s legacy may make explicit, in ways that his own, humanities-based writings attest, is that there cannot be scientific accounts of the world which are not also embedded in, surrounded by, and associatively connected with other kinds of (“humanist”) knowledge, framing the world in terms of its lived possibilities, in terms of its possibilities of becoming-other, that the natural sciences alone cannot address. What Derrida makes clear is that this very act of naming “the animal” is already relegation of the animal to mute inarticulateness, the granting of the power of political and cultural representation, of representationality itself, to the human alone. We need a humanities in which the human is no longer the norm, rule, or object, but instead life itself, in its open multiplicity, comes to provide the object of analysis and poses its questions about man’s—and woman’s—specificity as a species, as a social collective, as a political order or economic structure.

Darwin and the Distinctively Human

Darwin published The Descent of Man (1871) in part as an attempt to demonstrate that the principles he outlined for explaining the origin and evolution of species in On the Origin of Species (1859) were as relevant for an analysis of man, mankind in all its sexual and racial variations, as they are for the analysis of the descent of animal species from preexisting species. While he famously also delayed the publication of his book on man after the long-delayed publication of On the Origin of Species, fearing a wide-scale backlash, this was a book that he wisely understood was needed to address why in “man” there are two sexes, and why among all the forms of man, there are different races with different qualities even if there is no measure that could hierarchically order the races of man. He needed to show both that the principles broadly regulating the modification or genealogy of species applied also to man and that nevertheless these principles are able to address very wide variations in behavior and appearance that distinguish the different types of “man” from each other.

Darwin’s argument, in brief, is that the differences between man and other animal species are differences of degree, not differences in kind, and that the differences between the races and cultures of mankind are likewise differences of degree and not kind: “We must … admit that there is a much wider interval in mental power between one of the lowest fishes, as a lamprey or lancelet, and one of the higher apes, than between an ape and man; yet this immense interval is filled up by numberless gradations…. [Differences,] between the highest men of the highest races and the lowest savages, are connected by the finest gradations. Therefore it is possible that they might pass and develop into each other” (The Descent of Man, 1:35).

The idea of “numberless gradations,” of the “finest gradations,” of “no fundamental difference” (ibid.), anticipates one of the most profound and motivating of concepts in twentieth-century thought and beyond: the idea of difference, of differences without the central organizing principle of identity—not a difference between given things, a comparison, but a difference which differentiates itself without having clear-cut or separable terms. Darwin affirms that the differences between the lowliest fish and mankind is not a difference in kind but a difference of degree, a difference that can be obtained by insensible gradations, the slowest movements of transformation that link the existence of one species to the emergence of another. To affirm as he does that “there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties” (The Descent of Man, 1:35) is to affirm both that man and mammals, and mammals and all other living things, are linked through “numberless gradations.” It also affirms that there may not be only two different kinds of knowledge about these two kinds of living beings (one human, the other animal) but also a new kind of hybrid knowledge, somewhere perhaps between the natural sciences (which encompasses man’s knowledge of other animals and objects, man’s knowledge from outside) and the humanities (which include man’s knowledge of man and his various social institutions and products) that can more adequately address the implications of this fundamental continuity, indeed genealogy, between man and all other now or once living species, and indeed between man and the materiality of the nonliving universe.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from becoming undoneby ELIZABETH GROSZ Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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