Cosmopolitan Animals

Kaori Nagai, Caroline Rooney, Donna Landry, Monica Mattfeld, Charlotte Sleigh, Karen Jones, Kaori Nagai, Caroline Rooney, Donna Landry, Monica Mattfeld, Charlotte Sleigh, Karen Jones, Kaori Nagai, Caroline Rooney, Donna Landry, Monica Mattfeld, Charlotte Sleigh, Karen Jones

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137376282
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Cosmopolitan Animals asks what new possibilities and permutations of cosmopolitanism can emerge by taking seriously our sharing and 'becoming-with' animals. It calls for a fresh awareness that animals are important players in cosmopolitics, and that worldliness is far from being a human monopoly.

Part I

Cosmopolitics

Introduction

Donna Landry

Animals have always been cosmopolitans. Only humans, in their speciesist arrogance, may find this book’s title innovative. Although a cosmopolitanism extending beyond the human might be seen as yet another form of cosmopolitanism from below, such a rethinking requires nothing less than an opening both beyond the human and beyond the dictates of what can be known in advance of any articulation. In the opening essay of this section, and of the book as a whole, Simon Glendinning observes that Aristotle’s select political animals, Man, Bee, Wasp, and Crane, have now morphed into the more mundane Man, Rat, Fox and Crow. As cosmopolitan species, these are ‘not so much the worldly sophisticates as the eat-anything-live-anywhere global survivors’. To Glendinning’s list of animals with claims to cosmopolitanism, this book proposes to add frogs, many species of bird, tigers, whales, and under the ‘Companionship’ rubric, dogs and horses. This list is only a beginning.

In Western theories of cosmopolitanism to date, Kant’s proposal for achieving universal peace by means of inter-national agreements has served as an important touchstone. When war zones and bloody war crimes proliferate daily, universal peace may not seem like such a bad idea. Yet Kant’s cosmopolitanism, brokered by nation-states, and grounded in a ‘right’ of hospitality, conceived as a highly conditional ‘right to visit’, is far from a radical or unconditional political opening (Kant, 2003: 15–16). Kant’s formula presents problems for many members of the human population (see Yeğenoğlu, 2012), let alone animals and other entities, within the cosmos conceived as ecological biome.

‘The cosmopolitical’ has therefore been proposed by Isabelle Stengers precisely as an opening out of the cosmopolitan beyond the human and also beyond the dictates of what can be known in advance of the coming together and mutual articulation of all these entities. Like other critics of Kantian cosmopolitanism who have been ‘inoculated against post-humanism’, in Donna Haraway’s phrasing (Haraway, 2013), Stengers finds Kant’s vision of universal human-only peace a form of closure, a bounded and binding as well as narrowly state-ratified ideal. Stengers objects that such an idealization leads Kant to denounce the world as-it-is in favour of an ideal world. ‘In the term cosmopolitical’, Stengers writes, ‘cosmos refers to the unknown constituted by these multiple, divergent worlds, and to the articulation of which they could eventually be capable, as opposed to the temptation of a peace intended to be final, ecumenical: a transcendent peace with the power to ask anything that diverges to recognize itself as a purely individual expression of what constitutes the point of convergence of all’ (Stengers, 2005: 995). Kant’s universal peace thus not only forecloses possibilities of needs and desires that lie beyond his conception of the liberal state (see Achcar, 2013: 103–16) but also offers itself as the consummation of consensus, an idealization and denial of the world as it is in all its contentiousness.

Donna Haraway endorses Stengers’s refusal to ‘denounce the world in the name of an ideal world’ (2008: 83). For Haraway, the cosmos is ‘the possible unknown constructed by multiple, diverse entities’, and hence cosmopolitics must be thought of as enacting ‘decisions’ that ‘must take place somehow in the presence of those who will bear their consequences’ (83). The ‘articulation of which they could eventually be capable’, in Stengers’s terms, would enact at the very least multispecies decisions. The chapters in this book demonstrate multiple ways of beginning to attempt multispecies decision-making, as suggested by Charlotte Sleigh, for example, in the case of frogs.

Andrea Haslanger’s review of cosmopolitanism from Diogenes, self-proclaimed citizen of the world, to the Stoics, Kant and recent debates (Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, Anthony Appiah) leads her to suggest a return to Diogenes’s Cynic cosmopolitanism, in the name of animals. The Cynic thinks critically and independently, ‘lives with dogs and as a dog’, and ‘barks to shock and to warn’. Canine Cynicism is thus a form of mobilizing critique that aims to alert ‘people out of their complacency, their anthropocentrism, their uncontested participation in politics’, that is, in a politics that is exclusively human. Cynic cosmopolitanism thus provides ‘the beginnings of a way to think about cosmopolitanism across species’. Other concepts will be necessary, Haslanger concedes, for a more constructive notion of cosmopolitanism, one more attuned to ‘obligation, interdependence, durable community’. Yet without the beginnings of a critical operation against entrenched anthropocentrism, which Cynic cosmopolitanism does provide, we will be unable to act decisively ‘in the present’ and may simply hunger instead after ‘promises of a more perfect future’.

The problem of articulation, of what constitutes a speaking that can be heard in the cosmopolitical arena, is emblematized by the globe-girdling frog in Charlotte Sleigh’s essay. The many species of frog – the frog thus constituting a Derridean animot (a ‘frogimot’?) in its heterogeneity – have become not only infinitely dissectible, and thus ‘hapless “martyrs”’ in the cause of science, but also signifiers of biodiversity catastrophe, rainforest destruction and the need for species preservation. Given the urgency of this frogaltern speaking, ‘why can we not hear it?’ How might we be able to? Finding Bruno Latour’s work on the agency of entities failing to provide answers, Sleigh proposes that a responsible beginning might be with affective attachments – the love that herpetologists (those who study reptiles and amphibians) have for their subjects. These scientists ‘love frogs a great deal more than one might expect a scientist to admit’, even speaking on their behalf ‘as though passing on what frogs have said’. Since these scientists possess the very ‘curiosity to enter animal worlds’ that Donna Haraway has criticized Derrida for lacking, why not license them to ‘reunite their scientific and instrumental judgements’? ‘Frogs can’t speak’, Sleigh concludes, ‘but it’s scientists we should help to talk’. Through their frog-affinities, herpetologists have come as close as any humans are likely to come to assuming a frog’s vantage point from which to judge the desirable and the necessary.

The most radical challenge to human socio-political cosmopolitanism comes from Caroline Rooney, who invites us to think through the non-Western, non-terrestrial, even ‘cosmonautical’ implications of animist philosophy and myth. Since within animist thinking ‘all animals exhibit living spirits alike’, Rooney asks ‘whether there may be an animal religion or animal religions’, speculating as to ‘whether the human animal sense of the sacred and its violations might be shared by other animals’? Reading Farid Ud-Din Attar’s Sufi fable The Conference of the Birds, Rooney counters the equation frequently made between spirituality as such and Judaeo-Christian and Islamic monotheist justifications for domination. Donna Haraway, for example, has suggested that the teaching of ‘modern Christian creationism’ ‘should be fought as a form of child abuse’ (1991: 152). Haraway ironically ‘prays’ that her substitution of the word ‘critters’ for ‘creatures’ will silence ‘all residual tones of creation’, as in ‘origin and telos in a father god’ (2008: 67, 330 note 33). The revelation which Attar’s birds receive is that there is ‘no cosmic overlord as such, so much as a transformed understanding of transcendence’ itself, with ‘ramifications for the impositions of human sovereignty on nature and any assumptions of lordship over the universe’. The birds are given to realize that they themselves ‘are collectively what they seek, not in a simply secular or worldly sense (which would imply a pointless outcome to the quest), but rather in terms of the non-duality of the sacred’. Rooney finds further evidence of ‘cosmonautical’ openings into animate-collectivity in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Shakespeare’s Pericles and Melville’s Moby-Dick. Some readers have found Life of Pi (like Pericles) ‘disappointing’, Rooney observes, because of the strange effect that they produce, ‘one of crossing over into them as totally real worlds, unframed as “art”, the distinction between art and life erased, the distinction between reality and appearance inapplicable’. Rooney’s intervention reminds us that African, Sufi, Hindu and other animisms still persist today despite the depredations of colonialism and modernity, offering us all the prospect of an untamed freedom, of the sense that we ‘share and participate in a spiritual cosmos that cannot be territorialized, that is, located in the ownership of forms’. There are resonances here between Rooney’s thinking and Donna Haraway’s endorsement of animism as ‘the only sensible version of materialism’, following Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.

We end with Simon Glendenning’s call for the fellowship of and fellow travelling with our ‘fellow creatures’, after Copernicus: ‘those we increasingly respond to as our fellows in mortality’. Glendinning, working within the continental Kantian and Derridian philosophical traditions, returns us to ‘animal cosmopolitanism’ but in terms that Stengers and Haraway might approve – as a cosmopolitical opening, not merely an inclusion of animals within existing socio-political hierarchies, but a fundamental rethinking of all mortal life as fellow and creaturely. Glendinning hopes that extending the concept of the fellow creature ‘beyond the human’ might be understood ‘as an expression of our contemporary aliveness to animals as being, in this old and worn out world, more and more in the same boat as we are’. Glendinning proposes that in our time ‘cosmopolitan animals’, far from being one ‘theme’ or ‘project’ among many, may constitute the one project with ‘the power to gather together all other movements in mutation concerning our understanding of the world and the significance of our lives’. Never has such a project been more urgently necessary.

References

Achcar, G. (2013) Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism. London: Saqi.

Haraway, D. (1991) ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 149–181.

—— (2008) When Species Meet. Posthumanities volume 3. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

—— (2013) ‘SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far’, Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No.3. doi:10.7264/N3KH0K81 http://adanewmedia.org/2013/11/issue3-haraway/ (accessed 12 February 2015).

Kant, I. (2003) [1795] To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. Trans. T. Humphrey. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing.

Stengers, I. (2005) ‘The Cosmopolitical Proposal’, in B. Latour and P. Weibel (eds), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, Mass; London: MIT Press, pp. 994–1003.

Yeğenoğlu, M. (2012) Islam, Migrancy, and Hospitality in Europe. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

1

A Time after Copernicus

Simon Glendinning

We live in a time of mutation. We – who? We the inheritors of the understanding of the world and the significance of our lives that belongs to the Greco-Christian epoch we still inhabit, the epoch that Heidegger called the epoch of ‘the first beginning’ (2000: 125), and that Derrida called the epoch of ‘the sign’ (1998: 14). This mutation belongs to a movement of decentring: the displacing of a discourse in which what is called ‘Man’ holds a special position or distinction at the centre of nature and history. In this mutation, Man is knocked of his pedestal.

Talking of ‘our time’ as ‘a time after Darwin’, but transparently also a time after Copernicus (Freud said, in addition, a time after Freud, but I will come back to that), the British philosopher David Wiggins, in a text written before the fall of the Berlin Wall, describes this mutation neatly, if not unproblematically, like this:

Unless we are Marxists, we are more resistant [today] than the eighteenth- or nineteenth-centuries knew how to be [to] attempts to locate the meaning of human life or human history in mystical or metaphysical conceptions – in the emancipation of mankind, or progress, or the onward advance of Absolute Spirit. It is not that we have lost interest in emancipation or progress themselves. But whether temporarily or permanently, we have more or less abandoned the idea that the importance of emancipation or progress (or a correct conception of spiritual advance) is that these are marks by which our minute speck in the universe can distinguish itself as the spiritual focus of the cosmos. (1998: 91)

The mystical and metaphysical conceptions at issue here are ways of thinking some kind of ultimate unity of Man and Cosmos, or of Man and World. In mystical thought attaining unity with the One is, in principle, something we can achieve now. In metaphysics by contrast this unity is posited as a spiritual finality in which Man attains a proper relation to himself and to the World in a movement of emancipation and de-alienation. It is the metaphysics of the epoch of Greco-Christian anthropo-teleo-messianism which dreams of the future achievement of a condition in which the inherent capacities of Man finally flourish. Within this epoch one finds again and again the thought that this is an inseparably global development, fundamentally tied to the future attainment of a cosmopolitan existence, where every other is my fellow, not just ‘my fellow Americans’ or ‘my fellow Europeans’.

But these fellows – all of them – they are all human, and first of all men (males): my fellow is my brother. Hence we might also speak of the epoch in mutation in our time as the epoch of androcentric cosmopolitanism. Here is Derrida on this tradition:

[The cosmopolitan tradition is one] which comes to us from, on the one hand, Greek thought with the Stoics, who have a concept of the ‘citizen of the world’. And also, on the other hand, from Saint Paul in the Christian tradition, where we find another call for a citizen of the world as, precisely, a brother. Paul says that we are all brothers, that is, sons of God. So we are not foreigners, we belong to the world as citizens of the world. (Derrida, 1997)

We the inheritors of the understanding of the world and the significance of our lives that belongs to the epoch of anthropo-teleo-messianic reason, the epoch of androcentric cosmopolitanism, we live in a time of mutation, of epochal exhaustion, of deconstruction. We could focus on the slow and painful access of women to this brotherhood, but I am confident that the matter for thinking that is announced in the title ‘cosmopolitan animals’ – perhaps heralding the projection of a cosmopolitanism beyond the community of ‘brothers’, whether these are men or women – is not one theme among others in this time. It perhaps has the power to gather together all other movements in mutation concerning our understanding of the world and the significance of our lives.

What then can we say about cosmopolitan animals today? Philosophers are already familiar with the idea of political animals – animals plural, animals in addition to Man. Going right back to Aristotle we have had this idea. In his History of Animals, Aristotle maintained that some gregarious animals – not those that merely herd or flock together or swim together in shoals – should be called ‘political animals’: ‘Animals that live politically are those that have any kind of activity in common, which is not true...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I  Cosmopolitics
• Part II  Hospitality
• Part III  Companionship
• Part IV  The Postcolonial
• Index