Writing Animals

I
There are many forms of “animal” writing — one might write of farming animals, or of hunting them, one might taxonomize, or write a history of our relations with them, or of our representations of them, etc. I am writing of writing, sympathetically, in advocacy, in the joint understandings that we have no dominion — they are not for our use — and that their rights to life, and to maximization of the quality of that life, are much as we conceive our own. Writing enters a new place under such beliefs. In a sense it has to wrench itself away from itself. I want to write, with that new place in mind, of writing as a means by which we might approach that place.

But there are problems. Even the word animal itself is a problem. There is no such thing, Jacques Derrida says, as “animal,” let alone “the Animal,” unless the latter be taken as a conceptual construct, much as we might speak of “the Republic,” “the Infinite,” etc. “Animal” and “the Animal,” Derrida says, are lumpen terms, a form of intellectual violence.1 There are only cat, dog, giraffe, cicada, kangaroo, rat, ant, etc. If we speak of animals, then it should be of the specific animals to which we refer. The term animal, cum Martin Heidegger, who devotes much of Being and Time to this project, is a concept, a construction, in order to define (and keep cat, dog, cicada, etc., from) the human, largely by listing what the “human” is not.