Cosmopolitan Belongingness and War

Animals, Loss, and Spectral-Poetic Moments

Matthew Leep

• Verlag: SUNY Press
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438482453
• Thema: Social Sciences
• Thema: Violence in Society

In Cosmopolitan Belongingness and War, Matthew Leep develops a cosmopolitan account of war that blends sharp inquiry into interspecies politics with original poetry on animals, loss, and war. Informed by the works of Jacques Derrida, this book is not only a somber and sobering exploration of the loss of animal lives during the Iraq War—from the initial US invasion to later struggles with ISIS—but also an imaginative tracing of animal experiences in "spectral-poetic moments." By emphasizing elegies, poetic space, and multispecies belonging, Leep envisions the cosmopolitan text as a hybrid form of critical and poetic engagement with animal others. An insightful mix of cosmopolitan poetics, poetry, and analysis of the Iraq War in its multispecies entanglements, Cosmopolitan Belongingness and War connects contemporary concerns with political violence, memory, and interspecies politics to imagine a more spectral, posthumanist, and poetic cosmopolitanism. Interdisciplinary in scope, this book will engage scholars of international relations, political theory, US foreign policy, animal studies, poetry, and Derrida, as well as those interested in human-animal relations in perilous times.

Chapter 1

Spectral Cosmopolitanism

But memories no longer recognize such borders.

—Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx

There is a black-and-white photograph of the 1991 Gulf War oil fires that shows bodies of camels strewn about in the desert.1 Oil fires and smoke plumes are in the background. Fire, smoke, bodies becoming lost—moments gone, moments within us, moving forward.

“Qarqar”

Shadow-seized, the quiet will carry us.

All things never …

One more song, small camel.

Our geologic lines, twined, concealed.

Your neck—soft and singular—still.

Sinking with the weight of lost time.

Losing the strength of our Qarqar ancestors.

Watching you,

my world.

I am listening

for you,

the world.

In thinking of and with these camels—nameless (or at least names we cannot know), anonymous, gone—we might be drawn into memories not our own. We might uncover moments of war and the experiences that make war. We might be drawn into the lives of lost camels and into questions about our multispecies pasts and futures. Camel-self extensions, touching traces of unnoticed lost moments, imprinted as questions within us. In poetry, we might be with the lost, seeing us—in the distance, beyond borders, beyond life. These camel moments also remind us of the uncountable, unphotographed, unknown, and unknowable moments of war. “We are poor passing facts / warned by that to give / each figure in the photograph / his living name.”2 These lines by Robert Lowell point us toward a responsibility to remember the moments and experiences of the named and nameless. Symbolic of desert-dwelling, camels are much more than desert icons; they are beings with complex desires and interior lives, experiencing each other’s deaths. They are irreducible to the name “camel,” to this thinking of experience. They are spectral worlds, camel-islands, island-worlds beyond us. We know of but never fully know these island-worlds. But we might poetically imagine them, bringing these experiences into being and to bear on our understanding of war. We might listen to these passing facts and reflect on the living name of the lost.

John Berger writes of humans and animals as parallel lines and how “only in death do these two parallel lines converge.”3 Death brings us, perhaps binds us, together. But these lines converge before and after death in so many ways. Our histories and futures of living and dying on the planet are interconnected, our political and ecological fates shared. Global pandemics involve trans-species infections and demand that we imagine possibilities of living differently with animals. As the planet warms we experience deadly wildfires together. Whenever militaries have exercised their power, human and animal bodies have become ruins. In the mid-1800s, the U.S. military hunted and exterminated bison in order to control and kill Native Americans. Gil Scott-Heron spoke of this loss in a critique of American democracy. Carl Sandburg’s poetry also reminds us of this loss, the missing witnesses, the animal experiences, and the ghostliness of interspecies living and dying. “Those who saw the buffaloes are gone / And the buffaloes are gone.”4 We live and die with animals, and our poetry reflects this. In poetry we feel the other’s last breath. After the other’s death, we write about their absence. Spectral lines, conjured and connected. Our parallel lines blur in moments of living and dying. These lines divide, grow, and cut in multiple directions, becoming spirals that twist into each other. We are tangled filaments, twisted together in histories and futures of loss.

What will you say? I imagine asking the lost animals of Iraq. This is an unanswerable question that nonetheless begins to transfix and unravel war into its spectral moments. This question anchors our thinking of war to the unclosable spectral voices—lost, imagined.

Derrida reminds us that we must “learn to live with ghosts” (apprendre à vivre avec les fantômes).5 This book is about learning to let animal ghosts reframe our understanding of war, ourselves, our relation to distant loss, and perhaps our sense of distance. And this chapter is an investment in this spectral endeavor, this spectral cosmopolitanism. It is a reflection on how we might approach war in terms of spectral-poetic moments. It is a meditation on the ghost’s voice—our own voice, discerned in the other. To “learn to live with ghosts” is thus a spectral-poetic turn toward the other, within the self. Self-reflexive and poetic, spectral cosmopolitanism involves reading untranslatable moments of loss in the distance; it involves listening to and learning from imagined lost voices of animals. Death is always a central concern for scholars of war. For the (spectral) cosmopolitan, this concern becomes an elegiac possibility for connections to the lost—to the uncountable and unknowable hearts.

This chapter thinks toward the voices of absence, voices pulling us together, toward an elegiac space for the other. It struggles toward the surprise of the spectral, toward a contingent view of a global politics that is “always and already” ghostly.6

The apparitional presence of others figures prominently in several of Derrida’s works, perhaps most notably in Specters of Marx. Here, Derrida proposes the idea of the specter as that which “appears to present itself during a visitation. One represents it to oneself, but it is not present, itself, in flesh and blood.”7 A specter is “what one imagines, what one thinks one sees and which one projects-on an imaginary screen where there is nothing to see.”8 We see specters “where there is nothing to see” (là où il n’y a rien à voir); in other words, we imagine the lost other, their visitation.9 Derrida also discusses specters in terms of “ghosts” (les fantômes), including the ghosts of war. In these discussions he writes of the importance of a ghostly dialogue, of the need to speak of, to, and with such ghosts: “It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it.”10 While spectrality (spectralité) is not limited to ghosts or to thinking of and with the dead (spectrality appears in many other ways in Derrida’s writing), as Martin Hägglund notes, it can refer to the “haunting reminders of the victims of historical violence, of those who have been excluded or extinguished from the formation of a society.”11 Such reminders, Derrida argues, are the remains of justice calling out “in the name of justice” (au nom de la justice).12

Spectral cosmopolitanism involves a poetic space for the ghostly presence of the lost animals of war. The turn toward this space is a turn away from war as a concrete and (mostly human) coherent event and toward its less-knowable (and unknowable) multispecies moments through an imaginative sense of beyond-human belongingness. This turn is coupled with a spectral-poetic movement that disrupts the linearity of our voice with other voices, opening up a space for grappling with the strangeness of ourselves and nonhuman others across temporal and geographic boundaries. In this way it shares similarities with Martha Nussbaum’s call for “imagining and storytelling,” an “imagining the lives of animals [that] makes them real to us in a primary way, as potential subjects of justice.”13 This approach involves a kind of ghost poetry, a kind of multispecies storytelling of, with, and for the lost.14

But this approach does not use literature or poetry to conceive of a specific cosmopolitan justice or “animal rights” framework. As Derrida reminds us, spectral haunting is an apparitional move toward a justice “where it is not yet, not yet there, where it is no longer, let us understand where it is no longer present, and where it will never be, no more than the law, reducible to laws or rights.”15 Poetry about, for, and with animal ghosts constitutes an attempt to sense the gaps of justice, an effort to learn from, about, and with the other, from a past where justice never was. Spectral cosmopolitanism therefore involves thinking, writing, and positioning into these gaps. It reframes a conversation about justice on the terms of haunting moments of loss. It is about seeking an entryway into seeing what is “not yet there, where it is no longer.” It points to the urgency of being seen by those calling for justice where it is “not yet there, where it is no longer.”16

A motivating aim of cosmopolitanism is making possible “new ways of seeing the world.”17 Perhaps another aspiration should be thinking through possibilities of being seen by the world. To follow the gaze, gazing. To fade into the impossible spectral density of the world, to face toward ghost-dream heart beats. “I hear the heart-beat—I follow, I fade away.”18 Derrida writes how the “spectral someone other looks at us” and about how “we feel ourselves being looked at by it, outside of any synchrony, even before and beyond any look on our part.”19 Poetic space breaks itself open into these possibilities of sensing a ghost’s gaze, the spectral moments of the distant other au nom de la justice. Poetry is being seen. It marks the remains of justice. It is listening to the loss of the animal other—their voice, their hearts—lost, imagined, insistent.

This is a somewhat different path from most cosmopolitan approaches, but it certainly falls within the relatively recent reliance on literature by cosmopolitan thinkers such as Martha Nussbaum. Questions about the literary form of cosmopolitanism and literary possibilities within it trouble not only the internal order of cosmopolitan rituals of writing but also call attention to an indeterminacy which, in some sense, simultaneously conditions, gives rise to, sustains, and disrupts cosmopolitanism and its possibilities. Bruce Robbins and Paulo Lemos Horta associate cosmopolitanism with its expression in mutable multiplicities, arguing that cosmopolitanism “makes room for … multiple and overlapping conceptions, forced by the imperative of inclusiveness to change its own rules.”20 Without fully addressing this question, Robbins and Horta ask how we should “feel about the tendency for cosmopolitanism to overlap with or even take over the function of literariness?”21 In posing this question, however, they are primarily thinking about reliance on literature to understand cosmopolitanism. I suggest that cosmopolitans might become poets (or at least make space for poetry), not only as a way to “experience the inner life” of others, as Nussbaum writes, but as a way to involve lost others as active participants in our thinking and feeling—our becoming cosmopolitan, together.22 In this way, cosmopolitan writing is not only about global interconnectedness but also seeks it and embodies it, becoming a space for global and multispecies interconnectedness. If cosmopolitanism “signals a conception of belonging as open,” then the spectral-poetic move toward the other is an embodiment of this signal.23 It is a conjuration of belongingness across the lines of life, time, space, and species.

To that end, this chapter offers an overview of this spectral cosmopolitan approach to war. It describes the centrality of moments, poetry, ethology, animals, and “being-with” the lost. It sets the stage for the next few chapters where we will encounter the consequential agency of lost animal others, looking at us, belonging with us, always at a distance, within us. To poetically connect to the other, to feel their emergence as a compass toward thinking anew, is not to control what the other means but rather to break meaning open into its contingent possibilities.

We know that animals were killed in the Iraq War. We know these facts, this exteriority of evidence. The evidentiary details are akin to what Susan Howe calls “perceptions of surfaces.”24 How do we make space for the interiority of animal moments to bear on our understanding of war, of ourselves, of the world, of worlds-as-islands, within us? How might these lost animals speak to us, and we with them, to inform our future possibilities? How do we connect to and belong with the lost, in moments?

Moments

MO’MENT, noun [Latin momentum. This word is contracted from motamentum, or some other word, the radica...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Poems
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Cosmopolitan Elegies
• Chapter 1 Spectral Cosmopolitanism
• Chapter 2 Stray Hearts, Vectors: The Wandering Dogs of Iraq
• Chapter 3 Caged Cosmopolitanism: Menagerie Moments of War
• Chapter 4 Black Sheep: ISIS and the Smoke of Qayyarah
• (In)Conclusion(s): Spectral-Poetic Proximities
• Notes
• Works Cited
• About the Author
• Index
• Back Cover