The Animal Beyond Being

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- The Animal Beyond Being -

Heidegger, Derrida, Agamben__________________________

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Introduction

This paper examines some of the ramifications which follow from Heideggers

characterization of the animal as being poor in the world, for our understanding of

the human/animal divide through scientific practice. I take the enquiry

undertaken in the lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics

(1995) as a point of departure. I first show how Heidegger attempts to clarify the

ontological valence of the human/animal split from the constrictions

metaphysically set by his transcendental framework. I then propose to show how

Heideggers position, as well as the posterior attempts to radicalize his approach, as

seen in Derridas The Animal that I Therefore Am (2008) and Agambens The

Open: Man and Animal (2003), are unable to avoid the metaphysically-loaded

demotion of the animal in lieu of a tacit hypostatization of the human, as well as

resolve the fundamental quandary about the possibility of a thinking of animality

irrespective of ontologico-metaphysical categories. I propose thus to question

whether the post-Heideggerean critique of all attempts at a positive account of

animality, waged against both science and philosophy, can successfully advocate a

thinking of animality unencumbered by metaphysics, but without relapsing into

mysticism.


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Lead to the disavowal of being-in-itself, I first argue that the transcendental

purview within which Heidegger situates himself construes scientific

understanding and categorical intellection as a mere case of the occlusion of being

proper to the modality of presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit), resulting in an

anthropocentric approach towards the animal. The valence of these abstractions

become reduced to a product whose specificity is relativized to man. According to

Heidegger, a progressive ontological disavowal of metaphysical concepts enroots

man further down the detrimental obsession for a technical manipulation of the

world through scientific categories. This will later be thought of by Agamben as

the compulsive disclosureof beings by man, impervious to the co-constitution of

man and animal being. Scientific insight, in delineating the human/animal

distinction, must thus be confronted and either:a) Be provisionally suspendedas in the later Heideggers prescribed attitude of

releasement (Gelassenheit), since science produces merely a present-at-hand,

human-relative caricature of the animal; or Derridas ambiguous prescription for

an attitude of letting-be, that complicates the affirmative being of the apophantic

as such, and approaches the animal outside metaphysically specified essence

(whatness, Wassein) through the euche, or request.

b) Be integrated within an obscurely defined, modified practice - as in

Agambens attempt to radicalize the ontological difference, which dissolves the


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anthropological machine and with it the biopolitical investment carried through the

human-animal divide.

Having accepted that the objective specificity from which scientific predication

results is merely an ontic/derivative abstraction proper to the human kind, the

Otherness which resists ontologization in the animal leaves us in turn with an

exceedingly impoverished picture of animality as captive in its environment,

recalcitrant to any explanatory attempt to inform thought. This constriction forces

us into accepting the animals reduction to an automaton, in spite of Derrida or

Agambens attempts to wrest Heideggers insights from their

metaphysical/biopolitical residues. The lack of a transcendental disclosure in the

animal, and its intractability by the conceptual means of science or metaphysics,

ultimately entails that any ontological ascription becomes in principle refractory

from animal (non)-being. The latter is left thus to the anonymity of a quasi-

mystical, unknowable Otherness, against which categorical stratification cannot

but appear as a violent transgression or imposition from the part of man, a

noocentrismworthy of interruption.Finally, I conclude that a philosophy which can escape the methodological

subordination of science to transcendental conditions of access could contest the

reduction of scientific phenomena to human apprehension. Such a view may

thereby seek to rescue scientific practice from performing the ontological occlusion

esteemed by Heidegger, and which he takes as being responsible for our modern

derailment. Science could be rather thought of as penetrating into the being of the

animal as it is in-itself, and not merely into how the animal appears for us. This

would imply, as Quentin Meillassoux (2008) and Ray Brassier (2007) have


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proposed, that the correlationbetween man-world (and therefore the relativization

of being to conditions of disclosure, existential/linguistic/cultural) deemed

inescapable by philosophies of access[1]may be shattered, and that the epistemic

dependence of concepts of thinking should not entail the ontological dependence of

the objects conceptually described on thinking. Science can be taken then to be a

cognitively enriching activity on the part of man, plainly informing human practice

rather than obscuring our ontological ground, without loss, once the

disambiguation between epistemological and ontological dependence is thus

clarified, and the ontological relativization of objects on concepts is shown to stand

on fallacious grounds.

I Transcendence and Essence; Metaphysics and ScienceHeideggers (1995) FCM proposes to secure philosophys propriety against

science, art, religion, worldview and history. Metaphysics does not concern itself

with a particular being (God, the animal, the human), a stratifieddomainof

beings like science does (biological, physical, social), or even withallthe different

beings or domains of beings. Conceptual typologies are delegated to the secondary

onticenterprise expressed by scientific categories, while philosophy in turn

unearths their ontologicalground or enabling conditions through comprehensive

concepts(Heidegger: 1995, Pg 9). Philosophy occupies itself thus with the general

phenomenon of worldhood, which provides the understanding of beings-as-a-

whole, i.e. it thinks the unified, transcendental horizon for human being wherein

beings are made manifest: The fundamental concepts of metaphysics and the
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concepts of philosophy, however, will evidently not be like this [scientific

understanding] at all, if we recall that they themselves are anchored in our being

gripped, in which we do not represent before us that which we conceptually

comprehend, but maintain ourselves in a quite different comportment, one which

is originarily and fundamentally difference from any scientific kind. (Ibid)

As fundamental, metaphysical comprehension (begreifen) becomes the

condition of possibility for the rest of the sciences or merely ontic enquiries: there

are only sciences insofar as there is philosophy, not the other way around.", or even

more dramatically all science is perhaps only a servant with respect to

philosophy. (Ibid; Pg. 5) The ontological status of scientific description is thereby

deemed derivative from the transcendental structure of worldhood proper to

Dasein, and which it falls to philosophy to clarify. Heidegger's point is thus that

whatever science thinks can only obtain by abstracting itself from the horizonal

disclosure of worldhood in its richness, as it is a matter for the existential

attunements (Stimmen) or comportments (Verhalten) of Dasein's disclosure of

beings. But what kind of 'attunement', if not natural-scientific, could be adequate to

clarify the being of the objects in question? That is, how are we to think of the

"being of beings", if not through scientific abstraction?


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To fundamentally attune (Grund-stimmen) oneself in order to gain

ontological/metaphysical comprehension requires, Heidegger argues, to "step

back" from the scientific cognition of nature, understood as a categorically

stratified domain of beings, and move towards the transcendental disclosure of

being in general: This turning away of philosophy proper from nature as one

particular domain, from any such domain at all, is a going over beyondindividual

beings over tothis other. (Ibid: Pg, 39). Since every objective particular must be

rendered problematic, even the pure I of the Cartesian cogito must be questioned,

and with it the idea of cognition or consciousness as a property pertaining to a

specific substance, a property which would furthermore be the locus for thought,

i.e. the rational animal, the res cogitans, etc (Ibid; Pg. 55). Consciousness of

particulars, that is to say the traction of knowledge, is thus strictly the opposite of

fundamental attunements, which release (Lassen) and awaken Dasein to the

constitutive structure of worldhood, away from the abstract slumber amidst

individuated beings: If, however, we make an attunement conscious, come to

know of it and explicitly make the attunement itself into an object of knowledge, we

achieve the contrary of an awakening. The attunement is thereby precisely

destroyed, or at least not intensified, but weakened and altered. (Pg, 61)

Since for Heidegger metaphysics must pass over beings in order to attune

Dasein for unified worldhood, it is the latter which defines Daseins being; the

peculiarity of its being resides precisely in its being-in-the-world (Ibid; Pg. 24).


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Given that only metaphysics enquires into the world as such, and since having a

world constitutes Daseins ownmost being, Heidegger can claim that Philosophy

has a meaning only as human activity. Its truth is essentially that of human

Dasein (Ibid; Pg 19).

The pragmatic inflection in the appeals to 'activity' should not be

underestimated, but must nevertheless notbe thought of as pertaining to a relation

between a consciousness and a set of explicitly thematized possibilities in that

consciousness. This is obvious once we realize that such a move would

surreptitiously reactive the dyadic polarity of the subject-object dichotomy, which

remains still beholden to the ideal-categorical category of substance (ousia,

whatness,Das Was) in Heidegger's analysis. Rather, it is only Dasein, as the being

who discloses being in a purposeful manner, that articulates local 'meaning', i.e.

meaning is not a semantic or epistemological category, but is rather a pragmatic-

existential category relative to a nexus of aim-oriented comportments which onto-

logically precede thematized theorization. It is for Dasein that possibilities exist,

insofar as it can integrate itself to a nexus of significance, operate circumspectly in

an 'equipmental-whole' (Zeug). Possibilities are open to Dasein primarily in action,

and not by abstracting away from purposeful activity in theory. One doesn't so

much representthe world, Heidegger insists, as much as concern (Sorge) oneself

with it, through activity, in various manners and dispositions. By the same token,

the appearance of objectivity, and the substance-property amalgam proper to the


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ontic enquiry of science, must be thought of as derivative functions of the

'interruption', or breakdown of ongoing practical activity[2]. It makes no sense to

speak of an object as being 'in-itself', since the modality of being proper to presence

is correlative to Dasein's activity.

This way, in trying to wrest metaphysics from the purely ontic purview of an

enquiry centered on consciousness/science over into the general features of

worldhood, Heidegger allots scientific representation to being a derivative

comportment (Verhalten), and its objective phenomena are thereby made

ontologically relative to Dasein. As Ray Brassier (2007) notes, in denying the

ontological primacy of nature and beings, both debased to something that is

present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit), Heidegger anticipates the thesis that the world

as described by the sciences, and the stratification of beings in it, are mere empty

abstractions relative to man: What is ironic about Heideggers critique of

metaphysical subjectivism is that it is precisely his refusal to hypostatize the world

as present-at-hand object of representation that precipitates him towards the arch-

idealist conclusion according to which If noDasein exists, no world is there

either (Brassier: 2007, Pg. 162) Insofar as it remains tethered toan exploration of

consciousness, fundamental ontology cannot supersede the substantialist taint that

marks every epistemology, or indeed every existentialism. Humanism appears as

yet another symptom of the essential forgetting of the ontological question, and the

occlusion of being by science.


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Yet even if scientific representation is the height of anthropocentric

myopia, Heidegger wants to rescue the peculiar role that Dasein has as that being

on whose basis the question of being becomes meaningful, i.e. as that being "for

whom his being is an issue" (B&T, pp. 102). Dasein is the caretaker of being, insofar

as it is the structure of care (Sorgen) which makes it possible to relate to anything

whatsoever, i.e. what opens (Offen) Dasein to the possibility of being not just

opaquely absorbed, but existentially invested. And as Derrida will point out, it is in

this prerogative still allotted uniquely to Dasein that Heidegger reiterates the

Cartesian dualism of mind and world, separating the world-disclosing function

proper to Dasein from the self-enclosure of all other 'things'. Only Dasein discloses

being, and there are no beings except for Dasein; the latter is uniquely "Being's

Sheppard". Thus whatever is notwithin the scope of Dasein's world must lack even

the ontic status of being-within-the-world, and not just ontological disclosing

status of being-in-the-world. This follows since it is only Dasein that enjoys the

prerogative to disclose beings as beings, and such disclosure is simultaneously

their constitution. In doing so, Heidegger installs the intimate link between Being

(Sein) and human being (Dasein,) and the latters disclosure of the former, thus

cementing their indissociability. Our contention below is that far from deflating the

anthropocentric excess that Heidegger takes to be proper to every humanism, the

transcendental framework of fundamental ontology ultimately remains within the


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forth Dasein's ordainment to the care of being, in worlds.

Lacking the temporal horizon, Dasein would not have the capacity for care

itself, thereby shutting off the capacity for local ontic dealings with what is present-

at-hand or ready-to-hand, i.e. being is only disclosed to the extent that they appear

in some comportment or other within Dasein's being-at-hand; from engaged

practice to the abstractions of science.The predicative function of the apophantic

logos that characterizes the being of particular entities is thereby made entirely

relative to being-at-hand forDasein; that is, it is relative to appearing within the

horizon (Horizont) of worldhood disclosed by Dasein, and through the latters

comportments and attunements: "Being at hand or not being at hand decide

concerning being and non-being...the stone, in its being away [in its not being at

hand], is precisely not there. Man, however, must be there in order to be able to be

away, and only so long as he is there does he in general have the possibility of an

away." (Heidegger: 1995; Pg. 64)

Whereas the stones being-away implies its non-being, man must always be

there, since being is onlyfor and throughDasein, i.e. in man the crucial distinction

is between authentic awakening, triggered by fundamental attunements, and the

inauthentic slumber amidst beings proper to science and idle-talk (Garede)[3].
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However, if stones have no being outside relation to human Dasein, then this is

because particular beings all belong to the sphere of presence-at-hand objects

described categorically; the entire wealth of phenomena described by the natural

sciences included. At a loss for a horizon for disclosure, the specificity of animal life

must be likewise ontologically relative to man. Nature (phusis) as a whole is in turn

ontologically characterized in terms of the givenness of the phusei onta to Dasein

within the latters transcendental opening. Only Dasein is transcendental insofar as

it projects itself temporally, coming outside-of-itself, and enpresenting the

projection of possibilities oriented towards the future in the present. As Heidegger

says: Transcendere means to step over; the transcendens, the transcendent, is that

which oversteps as such and not that toward which I step over (Heidegger 1982:

299)[4]. Uprooted from its metaphysical ground, scientific phenomena can

therefore have no being apart from Daseins world-forming capabilities

(weltbildeng). There is no being in-itself, but only being for-us: Of course only

as long as Dasein is (that is, as long as an understanding of Being is ontically

possible), is there Being. When Dasein does not exist, independence is not

either, nor is the in-itself. In such a case this sort of thing can be neither

understood nor not understood. In such a case even entities within-the-world can

neither be discovered nor lie hidden. In such a case it cannot be said that entities

are, nor can it be said that they are not. (Heidegger 1962: Pg, 255)


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A being lacking the threefold structure of temporal ekstases would thereby lack

the capacity to enpresent, to be alongside, and therefore to encounter any beings. It

would be impossible for it to articulate anything like purposefulness that

constitutes practical activity in readiness-to-hand, as well as theoretical abstraction

in presence-at-hand. Lacking a temporal horizon, whatever is not Dasein lacks a

world, and lacking a world, they would lack the structure of concern under which

contact with all beings is made possible. Only Dasein can 'bind' itself to purposes;

however irreflexively, by having its temporal horizon synthetically integrated to its

being. It is only by having the possibility of resolutely appropriating its worldly

conditions that it may set itself free from the automatism of Das Man, i.e.

worldhood, in its full richness, is the condition for freedom and thus for choice.

However, doesn't Heidegger entail something stronger: namely that whatever is

not Dasein or for Dasein is not in-itself either? How can Heidegger speak of that

which is not within the horizonal disclosure of Dasein, but nevertheless is? Doesn't

this require the hypostasization of being-it-itself, which Heidegger has deemed the

supreme fiction of the metaphysical reification of presence? But if we don't accept

of the being of Dasein-independent entities, have we not thereby unleashed a

furious idealism, even more anthropocentric than the epistemological courts

suffered? As we shall see below, the question about the ontological status of

Dasein-independent entities corners Heidegger into an irresolvable quandary.

Having laid out these preliminaries, we will next address how Heidegger attempts

to describe by contrast the animals poverty in the world, given the lack for the

transcendental structure proper to Dasein which is world-forming.


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II Poverty in the World: Captivated NoumenaHeidegger attempts to situate "animal being" somewhere in-between the

wordlessness of inanimate objects (stones) and the world-forming capacity of

Dasein. In order to do so, he first raises the question: what could it mean to say that

the animal is poor in the world? (Heidegger 1995: Pg. 186). From the start, he

attempts to establish a crucial dividing line between animals and lifeless stones,

while keeping from the former the full-richness of the world such as formed by

Daseins transcendental horizon (Ibid: Pg 196). However, it is precisely this middle

ground between the rich world of Dasein and the wordlessness assigned to

inanimate beings which becomes impossible to occupy, and which finally seals the

fate of the animal into being little more than the worldless machinic automaton

depicted by the tradition. This will be shown to be a necessary conclusion given

Heideggers subordination of scientific categorization to metaphysical

comprehension, and of both to Dasein.

In continuity with his earlier debasement of scientific categories, Heidegger

begins the analysis by rendering the essence of animality impervious to the path of

the natural sciences: For if we follow this path we shall fail to address the question

from the perspective of the animality of the animal, and simply misinterpret in turn

what has already been misinterpreted and distorted by the physico-chemical

perspective, employing a psychology crudely adopted from the human domain.

(Ibid: Pg, 189)


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For Heidegger, the suspension of the scientific outlook is esteemed necessary in

order to avoid an anthropomorphizing imposition which distorts the essential

being of the animal, such as has been the case with the entire philosophical

tradition. The metaphysical interpretation of life proposed thus must reestablish

and clarify the organic continuity between originary philosophical comprehension

and positive scientific research. The severed link between these two poles

Heidegger deems symptomatic of our contemporary situation, devolved in

scientific hyper-specialization and its instrumental technical obsession, already

prefiguring the fatalistic vision of the world as seized by modern technology.

Oblivious to its metaphysical grounding, such a state of affairs is symptomatic of

contemporary science and represents its innermost danger science will not allow

itself to enter such a crisis because it is already much too preoccupied with the

realm of serviceability (Ibid). Thus the approach to the animal must also demand

an attunement or awakening towards the generality of its being, and a passive

releasement (Gelassenheit) of the scientific outlook centered in beings. In this

sense, to say that the animal is poor is simply meant to illustrate, Heidegger tells

us, that it is deprived of something fundamental, but it does not imply a

hierarchical value judgment of any sort (Ibid; Pgs, 196-7). But what is it exactly

that is lacking in and for animal being then, if not a world?Heidegger specifies his account further claiming that the poverty in question

entails particularly a lack of access towards being; that is having no access to

those beings (as beings) amongst which this particular being with this specific

manner of being is. (Ibid; Pg. 197) The lack of an ontological horizon would seem

to imply that the animal cannot ever encounter beings as such; that is, it could not


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encounter specific entities disclosed within a world, or find itself integrated within

a purposeful nexus of practical activity in an 'equipmental whole'. Nor obviously

could animals be said to 'theorize' in any substantive sense. Yet Heidegger sees the

danger in conflating the worldlessness proper to rocks to that of animals, or all

non-human entities more generally. When the lizard basks in the rock under the

sun it surely seems to relate to something. But instead of the properly ontological

disclosure of beings as such, which is peculiar to Dasein, the animal is said to

encounter its own proper things: One is tempted to suggest that what we identify

as the rock and the sun are just lizard-things for the lizard, so to speak. When we

say that the lizard is lying on the rock, we ought to cross out the word rock in

order to indicate that whatever the lizard is lying on is certainly given in some way

for the lizard, and yet is not known to the lizard asa rock (Ibid; Pg. 198)However, how can these anonymous animal-things, void of precise ontological

valence, be said to be encountered by the animal, so that they can be said to be

things nevertheless, remains obscure. How can there be a stratification of

individuated things outside being, and more specifically, outside the being of

presence-at-handfor Dasein[5]? This is enigmatic, given that the ontic specificity

of any particular entity, abstracted from a purposeful nexus, has been rendered

entirely correlative to Dasein in presence-at-hand, as a modality of being. Without

a horizon of meaning upon which the malfunction of equipment (Zeug) may

devolve in specific categorical abstractions which give particulars, it is unclear in

what sense the lizard or the non-human animal can generally encounter things.

Indeed, if worldhood entails temporal horizonal disclosure, then it seems that the

animal would require the ecstatic syntheses in order to allow itself to encounter
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anything as alongside itself. But this would entail endowing the animal with a

horizon for-being already, and would make of these 'things' finally beings within

the ontic disclosure of worlds. The dilemma between granting the animal freedom

and denying it any ontological disclosure renders problematic how one can

legitimately grant to the animal even a minimal horizon of worldhood apart from

categorical construal in scientific reflectionfor us[6].

Heidegger proceeds to depict life as the animal form of being wherein it

sees itself confined to its environmental world, immured as it were within a fixed

sphere that is incapable of further expansion or contraction. (Ibid). The

stratification of this environmental-world is therefore left in absolute anonymity,

part of the opaque animal Otherness to which we have no access, but which

remains void of ontological specificity, and which is never disclosed within a

horizon of possibilities in the encounter with beings proper[7].This is also why the

animal is said not to exist properly, but to merely live, insofar as existence is

relative to having a horizon of possibilities, and so to Dasein (Ibid; Pg 210). Yet we

have seen that Heidegger seems reluctant to reducing life to the machinic

automatism often described by the scientific instrumentalist conception of

organisms and their vital processes: We must attempt to make biology and

zoology recognize that organs are not merely instruments and that the organism is

not merely a machine. (Pg, 217)

We must note nevertheless that for Heidegger this precautionary move is

based on the supposition that scientific accounts of life cannot but be distorting

without a proper metaphysical footing of the sort that renders bio-physical space-

time ontologically derived functions of Dasein's existential temporality. This fuels
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the idea that science is the 'handmaiden of philosophy'. For as we saw above, there

is no time before or after Dasein, since it is only for the latter that a horizon of

temporality allows it to project, appropriate and enpresent, and so to eventually

encounter beings alongside, as extended in space and (chronological) time. Yet one

must ask whether accounts of animality would necessarily result in a distorted

picture of the animal as a machine, as Heidegger surmises here, if one is suspicious

about the ontological subordination of natural space-time to temporality[8].Given

that accounts of the relations between entities and their properties seem to entail a

"deterministic picture" of organic life, we might stipulate that science remains

fatally delivered over to a machinic vision of the animal, condemned to denying its

autonomy. Whether the instrumentalist conception of science advanced by

Heidegger, which makes of its phenomena heuristic fictions or abstractions for

human being, is tenable, remains open.In any case, this leads Heidegger into rejecting that any enquiry into the

essence of animality and its organic capacities could deal with determinate causal

factors between particular entities or properties through science: Thus the real

problem which is involved in determining the essence of life cannot even be seen

because life is now handed over to some causal factor. (Ibid; Pg. 223) Organic

capacities (Fahigkeit) or drives (Trieb) are said to precede causal interaction

between particular organisms themselves, and so the organ which arises in and

through the capacity is subservient [to these capacities]. (Ibid, Pg. 226)

Accordingly, it falls to Heidegger to clarify how these capacities obtain outside the

ontological framework of disclosure.


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In order to develop his account of animal capacities in contradistinction to

Dasein, Heidegger goes on to distinguish more precisely animal behavior

(Benehmen) within environments from human comportments (Verhelten) within

worlds (Ibid; Pg. 237). Whereas the latter involve the towards of ekstatic

transcendence reaching out onto beings, behaviors are said to act according to an

instinctual driven performing (Treiben), void of reflexivity, concernful

comporting, and so of any ontological horizon. In behavior, animals are absorbed

into themselves, says Heidegger, folded inwards without reflection.

Consequentially, environments are unlike worlds in that they captivate the animal

without the possibility of refusal or withdrawal (such as is possible in Daseins

fundamental attunements, i.e. profound boredom, anxiety).

Beings never become present for the animal, but the latter are taken over by

their own animal-things or disinhibitors without explicit recognition: This being

taken is only possible where there is an instinctual toward Yet such a driven

being taken also excludes the possibility of any recognition of presence. (Ibid; Pg.

242) Animal behavior (benehmen) is thus directed by instinctual drives in an

unrecognizing movement towards the anonymous things it is excited and rendered

captive by. As Heidegger tells us there is no apprehending but only a behaving

here, a driven activity which we must grasp in this way because the possibility of

apprehending something as something is withheld from the animal. (Ibid, Pg.

247). The bee is simply given over to the sun; the relations it has with its things

are preprogrammed as it were, organically and unknowingly, i.e. it has no relation

to present-at-hand, particular beings. And it has no binding to equipment in

practical holistic frameworks, no 'for-the-sake-of-which'. In captivation, the animal


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is suspended between itself and its environment, even though neither is

experienced as a being (Ibid). The crucial question must then become how to

characterize these non-ontological things which the animal exhibits openness

for., if not ontologically (Ibid; Pg. 248) Heidegger finally describes the animals

captivation within an environment through the metaphor of encirclement in

rings; a holistic and hierarchical system of drives in which the animal orients itself

instinctively, in automated fashion.We should note that in spite of his precautionary warnings to overcome the

machinic vision of animality, Heideggers account provides finally a picture of the

animal no less automated or machinic. For how are we to interpret that the animal

is merely captive, incapable of ever properly attending to something as such, if

not as the claim that the animal simply cannot deliberate or discriminate between

explicit possibilities, implicitly or explicitly, but is rather given over to blind

instinct and its organic drives? One might then raise the question about whether

the prescription not to ontologise the animal in terms of present-at-hand relations

between particulars and their causal interactions, like science does, is really any

more distorting or impoverishing than the barren description of the animal as

captivated. Perhaps it is rather the transcendental framework wherein Dasein

becomes the sole shepherd of being which is in turn impoverishing, reducing

every qualitative difference to emptying human abstractions.

Significantly, as is well known, that Heidegger restricts his analysis to insects

(moths, bees) and unicellular organisms seems to obviate the place of higher-end

mammals and other animals which, science tells us, presumably engage in

deliberative behavior akin that of humans. That Heidegger chooses to stay within


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the realm of insects is perhaps not simply a matter of convenience, given their

comparative simplicity, but symptomatic of an incapacity to gauge the possibility

of attributing any form of ontological horizon for anyanimal[9].Since Heidegger

has made it abundantly clear that being-in-the-world, and thereby existence, is

Daseins peculiar mode of being, and that only the latter possesses the as-structure

which is tantamount to having a horizonal deliverance in the Open, required for the

encounter with beings as such, he seems forced into allotting all non-human

animals into the same machinic straightjacket. This results in a cunning of

(machinic) reason, a Cartesian coup.

This image of the animal, as we have seen, makes of the animal not just a non-

linguistic being, but one which is absorbed into itself, encircled in environmental

rings, and captivated by anonymous disinhibitors to which it remains captive

through the organic whim of drives.[10]It is of outmost importance to notice that

this does not simply mean that animals do encounter beings but are not aware of

them at a loss for reason/language, but rather that they do not deal with beings at

all, i.e. behavior is never comportment: Yet behavior is not blind either, in the

sense in which we might want to say that that beings are certainly there for the

animal even though it cannot grasp them because it is not endowed with reason

and does not think. (Ibid; Pg. 253) And yet because it seems impossible to

characterize these anonymous animal-things without granting them some form of

ontological valence, Heidegger finds himself at odds trying to characterize the

animal poverty of the world without anthropomorphizing it through conceptual

means: The difficulty of the problem lies in the fact that in our questioning we

always and inevitably interpret the poverty in world and the peculiar encirclement
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proper to the animal in such a way that we end up talking as if that which the

animal relates to and the manner in which it does so were some being, and as if the

relation involved were an ontological relation that is manifest to the animal. The

fact that this is not the case forces us to claim that the essence of life can become

accessible only if we consider it in a deconstructive fashion. (Ibid; Pg. 255)Since science remains oblivious to its own tacit ontologization of the animal, it

is thereby blind to the anthropomorphizing violence it enacts, and to the

metaphysical exigency it would require to avoid its instrumentalist insertion of the

animal into a machinic cog. The attitude of releasement and of letting be is thus

of a piece with the anti-anthropomorphic or anti-noocentric imperative. Yet it is

precisely when attempting to overcome the (Cartesian) machinic picture of

animality that Heideggers account comes up short, in turn reproducing an image

of the animal as helplessly captivated, which applies just as easily to spiders as it

does to chimpanzees, unable to gauge any relevant dissimilarity between the two,

and impervious to anything science might say in this regard.

As we shall see in the next section, this reduction of the animal is precisely what

Derrida and Agamben attempt to overcome. They at once accept and at the same

time radicalize the ontological difference between beings and being which secured

for Heidegger the inseparability of ontological transcendental speculation from

ontic scientific reason, the better to render philosophical conception just as

dubious as science. Nevertheless, their attempts are finally incapable of enriching

the barren image of the animal as set by the philosophies of access.


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III - The Animal Beyond Being

Both Derrida and Agamben diagnose in Heidegger an unstated adherence to

the tradition he wishes to deconstruct. In The Animal that I Therefore Am(2008),

Derrida claims that Heideggers account is still too ingrained in the Cartesian

tradition he claims to have overcome, which as we have seen translates into

another machinic vision of animality: When Heideggers gesture is to move

forward in the direction of a new question, a new questioning concerning the world

and the animal, when he claims to deconstruct the whole metaphysical tradition,

notably that of subjectivity, Cartesian subjectivity, etc. insofar as the animal is
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concerned he remains, in spite of everything, profoundly Cartesian. (Derrida:

2008: Pg. 147)Derrida locates the undeconstructed aspect in Heideggers edifice in the

ontological structure of the as-such ascribed by Heidegger only to Dasein (Ibid;

Pg, 158). But instead of granting the animal this structure, which would thereby

rehabilitate it in order to make it eligible for worldhood proper, Derrida asks if it

can be said that even Dasein encounters the as-such. That is, he questions whether

man can indeed be the privileged locus for the openness to the being of the Other,

or whether instead it cannot but distort it to an anthropomorphized fiction, even as

it metaphysically approaches it: Precisely when it comes to beings or to very

determining experiences, those that mark us in particular can one free the

relation of Dasein (not to say man) to beings from every living, utilitarian,

perspective-making project, from every vital design, such that man himself could

let being be?... Is there a relation of apprehension to the being as such- the

ontological difference, therefore- to the being of the being, such that it lets the

being of thebeing be, such as it is, in the absence of every kind of design, living?

(Ibid; Pg. 160)

Derrida asks whether it is possible to actually transcend the logocentric

structure of transposition which, as we saw, permeated even into metaphysical

comprehension. He thus seems to accept the ontological difference, but anticipates

its radicalization, wresting the being of beings from the grasp of metaphysical

discourse and its 'comprehensive concepts' in order to let beings be, i.e. let them

stand as they are outside of the strict correlation to man, wherein it is distorted.


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As we saw, for Heidegger, the strife between inauthentic scientific

anthropomorphizing and authentic metaphysical comprehension found its apex in

trying to characterize the animals relation to the things it encounters in its

environment. This placed Heidegger in the uncomfortable, seemingly contradictory

position, under which animals both have and do not have worlds. However, given

that worldhood was for Heidegger entirely subservient to the ontological structure

which encounters being (the as such denounced by Derrida), strictly speaking, the

animal could simply have no world. The animal-things or disinhibitors described

by Heidegger, void of ontological specificity, would not suffice to grant the animal

the horizonal structure of transcendence which guarantees world-forming

capabilities. And indeed, it is unclear how anything such as 'things' could be said to

subsist, without surreptitiously reactivating the populating 'in-itself' of a

transcendent beyond, which seems like Kantianism run amok. And yet however

audaciously he may have struggled to grant the animal a world, impoverished as it

might have been, Heideggers attempts to do so seem vitiated by the construal of

animal captivity; the latters fatal absorption into itself. This is precisely Ray

Brassier's (2007) conclusion: Heideggers attempts to wriggle out of this

dichotomy by claiming that the distinction at issue is not between having or not

having a world but rather between entities that are rich in world (i.e. human

beings) and those that are poor in world (such as animals) is a desperate sophism

since he makes it perfectly clear that there can be no common measure for degrees

of richness or poverty in world and hence no possible transition from one to the

other. (Brassier: 2007, Pg. 254)


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being of the being, such that it lets the being of the being be, such as it is, in the

absence of every kind of design, living? It is evident that the difference between

Nietzsche and Heidegger is that Nietzsche would have said no: everything is in a

perspective; the relation to a being even the 'truest', the most 'objective', that which

respects most the essence of what is such as it is, is caught in a movement that

we'll call here that of the living, of life, and from this point of view the difference in

question between animals, it remains an 'animal' relation." (Pg. 160) Thus, any

positive thinking on animality remains caught in the distraught of the violence and

dominance of discourse, without repair. Yet his own proposal suggests a reworking

of the concept of the as-such, rather that its wholesale destitution. We must

complicate the 'as such' so as to show the primacy of privation in both Dasein and

animal alike. This is what Derrida tantalizingly proposes to think, with Aristotle, as

elaborating a non-apophantic, and therefore non-affirmative, function of the logos.

A negativity of the logos, primary with respect to its affirmative function, that

would allow to situate both man and animal under the same light. "Aristotle

himself takes into account a non-apophantic moment in the logos, a moment that

isn't declarative, enunciative, and the example he gives is that of requesting...And

the possibility of a non-apophantic logos here would, in my opinion, open a breach

in the whole apparatus, but I don't have time to show that." (Ibid; Pg. 157)Although he does not develop this line of thought in detail, Derrida hints

toward the Aristotelian euche as a kind ofrequestthat would logically precede the

affirmation of the logos apophantikos, as a candidate for the re-elaboration of the

as-such so as to guarantee a 'transport' (versetzen) to the animal unencumbered by

the violence of presence. He thereby also hints at the possibility of prayer


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occupying this non-assertive role, so that it "...doesn't show anything, [and] which

in a certain way, "doesn't say anything" (Pg. 157). What seems to be tacitly at stake

for Derrida in this crucially underdeveloped moment is the anticipation of an

elaboration on the old Mallarmean confrontation between the Christian drama of

the passion against Greek paganism. He takes the fundamental lesson of the

Eucharist to be the enacting of the possibility of an anticipation (Salvation) and a

remembrance(the Passion) as thepoliticalcondition for a new form of collective

life, separated thus from the pure presentation or representation of the Gods[11].In

other words, the function of the euche is to indicate the possibility of a

comportment not beholden to the primacy of presence, thus escaping the Greek

preponderance of par-ousia and judgment such as construed for Heidegger in

presence-at-hand predication. As Quentin Meillassoux (2012) develops: "To take

up Mallarme's vocabulary- and his evocation of 'God [...] there, diffuse'- we should

speak to signify the Eucharistic mode of presence, whether or not it is

transcendent, of a diffusion of the divine, opposed to its representation(the Greek

scene), or its presentation (Christian parousia)." (Meillassoux 2012; Pg. 112)

Derrida seems to seek thus an immanent rather than transcendent diffusion of the

divine in the form of the Other-animal, before which only the 'Eucharistic'

politeness of the request may avoid the dominating violence of affirmation.

Yet for all the timid insinuations that Derrida provokes in his text, some

rejoinders are in order. First, it is unclear why Derrida attributes to Heidegger the

unlikely view that the entire horizonal disclosure of beings is determined by the

logos apophantikos. Indeed, Heidegger is adamant to point out that while

apophansis constitutes the basis for the propositional form which expresses


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present-at-hand comportments in propositional judgment, Dasein primarily

discloses being and intends beings circumspectly, in readiness-to-hand, before

apophansis takes place. And so there is a sense in which already the aim-oriented

comportments of Dasein are not 'saying anything'. What is peculiar to apophansis

is then the saying that Derrida seeks to render problematic. However, what is at

stake for Derrida is also not to rehearse the primacy of practical comporting over

theory or discourse. The Greek-Christian euche is not the German Zeug; the

request or demand is not circumspection.

We must note at this point that Heidegger also insists that there is a distinction

between animals and Dasein not only insofar as the former lack discursivity or

propositionalcomporting. Rather, they lack comportmentsas a whole; as we saw

above, behavior is never comporting. What this means is that animals lack the

intentionalitynot only of objectual consciousness (presence-at-hand), but also that

of purposive practice (readiness-to-hand). And surely also of the ontologically

elucidating "fundamental dispositions". Their privation from being is absolute, it

cannot be commensurate with the privation which would lead to the request or

prayer in the euche, which is discursively enveloped, even if not affirmative. But

discursivity still entails apophansis qua making-present, and making-present

entails the horizonal disclosure of temporality, which is stipulated to constitute

Dasein's existence. If so, then the possibility of a different form of intentionality

which simultaneously speaks without 'saying anything' would still require

endowing the animal the temporal ekstases which we saw above constitute the

possibility of any disclosure of being, practical or theoretical, Eucharistic or

apophantic. For as we saw, the 'as-such' of Dasein's intentionality is not


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fundamentally discursive, but ekstatico-horizonal. What the animal lacks is

precisely the horizonal disclosure of Worldhood as temporality that defines the

being of Dasein, as the being of care.

Indeed, the euche, being resolutely discursive, operates within the temporal

horizon which defersparousiain futural anticipation and past recollection. And we

must insist that, for Heidegger, against Mallarme and Derrida, that the Greek

euche is indeed not logically anterior to parousia, but on the contrary is rather

derived, since it operates within the discursive parameters of objectual

individuation: one always praysforsomething or someone, which presupposes the

being-of-that One as a being. That is, the content of the prayer consists of

discretely individuated beings and properties, and thus presupposes judgment.

Thus both the euche and the 'prayer', reified by Derrida as announcing the

possibility of a non-affirmative relation to the Other, an immanent diffusion of the

divine, would still require the structure of the 'as-such' as thought of already by

Heidegger, rather than reworking its conceptual status. Derrida's crucial mistake is

thereby to think that the exhibition proper to the logos apophantikosis identical to

affirmation. Therefore, a non-affirmative discourse, as in the prayer or request,

would resist 'saying or showing anything'. But this is incorrect: in order to

individuate particulars, apophansis presupposes judgment and so predication, but

this need not be in the form of declarative utterances. Conditionals, requests, and

all forms of speech act, all presuppose and exhibit according to predicative content

all the same, as inherent to discursivity.One may object that Derrida is concerned neitherwith discursivity (not even the

non-affirmative Eucharist) nor with practical comportments, but that he is


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ascribing a resolutely non-intentional function to the euche. This is, I believe,

explicitly refuted by Derrida's own exemplification of the euche: "Me, I am

speaking to you" is discursively enveloped. Yet as we have surmised, the

Aristotelian function of the euche, although certainly not affirmative, is

nevertheless only possible under the onto-logical condition of conceptual

determination and linguistic predication. It follows trivially that the euche must

also be loaded with apophantic intentionality. For it simply makes no sense to

address-oneself-to-nothing in the act of requesting, anymore than it makes sense

to think of an intentionality with no correlate, whether this be an object

(Husserlian phenomenology, epistemology...) or significant aim (fundamental

ontology, the existential analytic of Dasein's everydayness...). It is one thing to

stipulate that non-affirmative forms of intentionality occur; indeed, Heidegger's

crucial insight is that such forms precede the apophantic modes of disclosure

reified in Greek philosophy. It is another to claim that it is possible to have an

addresswithout anysort of intentionality; indeed, to have something which one's

thinking or action is about, either in an address or request, is nothing but the

definition of intentionality.

But perhaps there is a kind of non-linguistic intentionality that is nevertheless

not practical either? A kind of anticipation amorphously directed at the void of

being? Although such an alternative seems resonant with the Heideggerean

account of fundamental dispositions (Grundstimmen;anxiety, profound boredom,

love...), these seem radically opposite to the euche and so the prayer, since the

latter are the opening to specific possibilities, whereas the former are nothing but

the refusalor leveling (i.e. in-differentiation) of all possibilities. Perhaps the stern


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Derridean might insist, contra Heidegger's insistence that any ontic encounter with

the thing as presupposing the apophantic predication of parousia, that a pure

opening to a particular Other is possible. An opening to some-animal that is,

although individuated in general as one-being, not yet predicated of in any way,

and so is devoid of any 'judgable content'. This would be to a kind of 'immediate

encounter' with the Other in thinking, in similar spirits to Russell's thought that it

was possible to knowparticulars by acquaintance in sensing. The latter has been

perhaps the most popular candidate for a pre-linguistic intentionality of

particulars, whether it be called psychological or mental, and whether it takes the

form of a naturalist empiricism or a perceptual phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty).

As Wilfrid Sellars (1956) points out, the Thomistic theory of the 'mental word'

already attributed a non-predicative, and so non-judgmental, intentional propriety

to sensation. Yet in order to ground propositional intentionality in a primitive

psychological intentionality of individuals, Thomism had to stipulate an isomorphy

between the objects of thought and the "mental word" imprinted on the senses[12].

It thus makes sense to say that a kind of intentionality still obtains there, since

there is a minimal objectified correlate functioning as the individuated content in

(immaterial) isomorphy to the object stipulated as being externally impressing on

the senses: "According to the Thomistic position although sense belongs to the

intentional order, it does not judge, i.e. the 'language of sense contains no

statements or assertions. Apparently sense can signify this white thing,but not this

thing is white, nor this white thing exists. (Sellars, Pg. 45) What the Thomists

argued, Sellars thinks, would attest to the possibility of a non-apophantic mode of

disclosure or intentional comporting which is nevertheless individuating its


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content, a kind of 'psychological intentionality' which would precede any kind of

capacity for judgment or assertion that is neither pragmatic nor merely a refusal of

all possibilities. This intending would be like presence-at-hand in intending

towards definite particulars, and like readiness-to-hand in being resolutely non-

discursive. By the same token, it would be unlike presence at hand in that it would

not be predicative or apophantic, and it is not like readiness-to-hand in that it is

has particulate address and not just an equipmental whole in act. Perhaps, then,

the animal could be said to be approached as a particular in a similar way, if not

through the presentation to sensing, at least through the affective anticipationof

intellection in request and the euche?[13]And wouldn't this escape, indeed, the

apophantic seal of predication, and the dominance ofparousia?

Now, I think it is instructive to see why this option becomes unacceptable for

Sellars, just as it was for Heidegger. For Derrida's argument to get off the ground, it

surely cannot suffice that one in prayer or request directs oneself at an 'anonymous

thing' blindly, with no differentiated content, just like the sensation of particulars is

not supposed to be of just 'a thing in general'. But it neither can it amount to the

mere capacity to elicit differential responsive dispositions interacting with an

environment, as even thermostats do discriminate between salient features in their

surroundings without us thereby attributing to them any kind of intentionality.

What both Derrida and the Thomist require is then that the subjects in question

sense/request the thing sensed/requested as a thing sensed/requested. But this

encountering something as something, both Heidegger and Sellars argue, is what

requires apophansis and so language.


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either Mallarme and Derrida seem to suspect. And predication implies, finally, the

showing of the logos apophantikos.Subtracted from intentional comporting, Derrida's allusions the request that

'says' and 'does' nothing finally ring hollow; and so with it the promise for a

positive approach towards the animal. In short, it is not clear that the request is

any less correlationally and so any less 'violent' simply because it does nottake the

form of an endorsement, since conditional statements, demands, and every kind of

propositional attitude presupposing apophantic objectification, cannot but

reiterate the disclosing or showing abjured by Derrida. Yet if the latter wants to

allude to a 'request' or demand that is not cognitive, thematized, or addressed in

such a way that it presupposes intentional objectivation, or holistic integration into

an equipmental whole, then he must provide an account for a kind of intentionality

that paradoxically does not intend towards anything; that is, that neither 'says' or

'discloses' anything, as he himself claims. But this is a conceptually incoherent

endeavor: such an attempt does nothing but reiterate the mystical idea of an

ineffable call to the Other, the diffused divine now immanent to the expanses of the

world. This seems to once again foreclose the animal from thought, reducing it

rather to what Hegel would have deemed the height of abstraction: an empty

Otherness or noumenal phantom, alluded to only in its opaqueness, recalcitrant to

any cognitive traction or description.

Such is the ultimate import of the Derridean extension of the privative aspect

of animality into ontology and so to Dasein. The same result that obtained for

Heidegger thus repeats itself in an exacerbated form within the deconstructive

procedure pursued by Derrida: all claims "about" the animal are, again, nothing but


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heuristic fictions relative to man. Indeed, instead of a subordination of science to

transcendental philosophy, Derrida simply reinforces the correlation between man

and world (construing the latter as the function of the former) so that nothing like

being as such ever enters into it, not even in a gesture of withdrawal. Thus, no

sufficient metaphysical effort could then clarify the abyss of separation through the

appropriate metaphysical speculation. Ontology, as much as the rest of the

sciences, is flattened onto the filiations of all human-relative discursive practices

that do nothing but attempt to 'speak the unspeakable', appropriating everything as

a correlate of itself, 'owning' the Other: "[T]his filiation governs... all domains that

treat the question of the animal, indeed, where the animal itself is treated: zoology,

ethology, anthropology, but first of all ontology, mastery by means of knowledge

and (zoo-bio-genetic) technology, as well as ethics, politics, and law." (Ibid; pp. 89)

Through deconstructive consciousness, one aims to destroy thus the

anthropocentric residue in Heidegger, which endowed Dasein prerogative of

setting itself before the withdrawal of being-as such. No longer aghast before

being's unrequited flirting, Dasein nevertheless finds itself now confronted in a

solipsistic abyss, a Cartesian epocheleading to slumber, without the hope for clarity

or distinctness to pierce the membrane of its autistic shell. Yet since this way what

withdraws from both man and animal alike is not, strictly speaking, beings

givenness, since it makes no longer any sense to speak of being-itself as the

prerogative of Dasein's disclosure. It then becomes impossible to provide an

account for the animal without relapsing into the kind of logocentric violence

Derrida deems ubiquitous in all discourse. This renders the animal world, or lack of


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a world, utterly intractable by speculative-theoretical means, or artistic-pragmatic

means. There where knowledge fails, the brooding mystical spell is cast.

However, let us note that, for Heidegger, the as such never meant to imply that

being gives itself transparently to Dasein, such as it would be supposed to obtain

outside the correlation or the strictures of the for-us which renders Worldhood

relative to comportments. For one of Heidegger's main points is that indeed Dasein

is indeed affected by privation, in the withdrawal of being from beings, or

eventually the strife between Earth and World. The point was, simply, that Dasein

alone is given over onto beings, so that the privation proper to the animal was not

that of the concealment of beings as an the stretching of an asymptotic horizon,

always extending beyond the present, but the closure of the horizon itself. The

crucial difference, for Derrida, thus seems to be that no concept, metaphysical or

not, comes closer at gauging anything like an authentic comprehension of being as

such; there is no non-latency that remains in co-appropriation with Dasein. The

question is then, what is the nature of the privation, if it is not that strictly that of

the strife between being and beings, Earth and World? How could such a difference

be mobilized without reifying that which is deprivedinto either abeing (ontic) or

thebeing of beings, as the opaqueness of the receding Earth? It is important to note

that Derrida does not, and perhaps could not, formulate an answer to this question,

resolving instead with yet another tantalizing predicament:

"Instead of simply giving speech back to the animal, or giving to the animal what the humandeprives it of, as it were, in marking that the: human is, in a way, similarly "deprived," by means of aprivation that is not a privation, and that there is no pure and simple "as such."... That wouldpresume a radical reinterpretation of what is living. naturally, but not in terms of the "essence of theliving." of the "essence of the animal.".... Naturally, I am not hiding this the stakes are radical thatthey concern "ontological difference," the "question of being." the: whole framework ofHeideggerian discourse." (Ibid; Pg. 160)


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That the as-such is always affected by privation means not only that being as

concealed is never identical to the disclosure of beings, but rather that strictly

speaking that "there is no pure and simple as-such" (Pg. 160) In the end, Derrida's

re-elaboration of the ontological difference consists in denying that being is ever

something which gives itself to a privileged locus for disclosure, a gift to any

being to bear the burden of caring for it. This leads Derrida to consider the

generality proper to the concept of animal to constitute a stupidity, occluding the

depth of differences in the animal as Other, now rendered wholly impervious to

conceptuality, scientific or metaphysical. The latters occlusion of depth is rather

the root of all violence exerted by humans against the animal:When one says animals one has already started not to understand anything, and has started

to enclose the animal into a cage. There are considerable differences between types of animals; thereis no reason one should group them into one and the same category

To place them all in one category is a very violent gesture indeed; that is, to put all living thingsthat are not human in a single category is, first of all, theoretically ridiculous; and partakes in the

very real violence that humans exercise over animals. That leads to slaughterhouses, their industrial

treatmentall this violence towards animals is engenderedin this conceptual simplification.[15](Derrida: Interview, 2004)

And yet the generalizing function proper to conceptuality, which Derrida

esteems as being both symbolically violent and at the same time responsible for the

very real violence enacted against animals, obviously would also apply at the level

of species, i.e. to group all apes under a singular term constitutes another

generalization, as does any concept deployed by thought to describe and stratify

phenomena into sets/categories. There are considerable differences between

specific apes, and such generalization can likewise be said to constitute a form of

violence under Derridas own strictures[16]. Extending to the wholesale

deconstruction of the apophantic as such mobilized by metaphysical discourse, the
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prescription against textualitys violence is thereby no longer targeted merely

against animality in general, but to the entire edifice of logocentric thought. As a

result, it is not just the world and the affirmative as such for Dasein which gets

dismantled, but the animalas suchin its ontic specificity, which becomes deflated

into a unfathomable Otherness to be approached cautiously from the non-

metaphysical stance of letting be. However, as we havesuggested, by jettisoning

the in-itself from speculative thought, Derridas construal of the animal seems to

approach the position of endowing the animal a sort of mystical ineffability, while

sacrificing thoughts affirmative purchase on being to the constraints of mediation:

Hence the strategy in question would consist in pluralizing and carrying the as

such and instead of simply giving speech back to the animal, or giving to the

animal what the human deprives it of, as it were, in marking that the human is, in a

way, similarly deprived by means of a privation that is not a privation, and that

there is no pure and simple as such. (Derrida: 2008, Pg. 160) In what follows we

shall examine one final attempt to resolve the quandary of the recognition of the

animal in its specificity and its intractable reality, in the work of Giorgio Agamben.

(b) The Inhibition of Being, or The Being That Dare Not Speak Its

NameFor Agamben (2003), rather than contesting Daseins privilege as the locus

for the disclosure of being, the task is to unearth the tacit co-determination

between man/animal at work in Heideggers text, the better to incorporate the

disclosing activity of man to a peculiar iteration of what he calls the


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anthropological machine (Agamben: 2003, Pgs 33-38). The latter becomes then

symptomatic not just of an undeconstructed Cartesian remnant in Heideggers

thought, but one more example of a space of exception in which the co-

determination of man and animal becomes the nest for biopolitical power to

distribute itself[17]. The anthropological machine in particular creates a zone of

indeterminacy where what lies outside of man is the exclusion of its inside (the

non-human within the human), and at the same time its inside becomes only the

exclusion of an outside (the human within the non-human).

We obtain thus simultaneously the animalization of man and the

humanization of the animal, as they co-constitute each other:

Like every space of exception, this zone [of indifference] is, in truth, perfectly empty, and thetruly human being who should occur there is only the place of a ceaselessly updated decision in

which the caesurae and their rearticulation are always dislocated and displaced anew. What wouldthus be obtained, however, is neither an animal life nor a human life, but only a life that is separatedand excluded from itself- only a bare life

We must learn instead to think of man as what results from the incongruity of these two

elements and investigate not the metaphysical mystery of conjunction but rather the practical andpolitical mystery of separation (Agamben, Ibid; Pg 38).

Agamben locates the zone of indistinction between animal and man nested

within Heideggers discourse in the latter's characterization of the unrevealed

disinhibitors proper to the former, the non-ontological quasi-things which excite

animals in their ontologically undisturbed captivity. Lacking access to The Open

(Offen) in which they are helplessly seized, the animal experiences the constitutive

lack of a horizon of possibilities, that is, the lack of a World proper. As we saw, this

fundamental constraint, derived from the lack of horizonal temporality, made the

animals relation to his disinhibitors ambiguous: not transcendentally anchored

on being, but neither indifferent to all relations in some sense. These quasi-beings


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attest simultaneously to a pure refusal of being and to an openness to something

other than being. But an openness for what, if not being? Void of ontological

status, the disinhibitors of the animal remain anonymousforces outside of them,

noumenal phantoms without the hope for disclosure, destined to their self-

enclosure in a purely negative refusal of possibility which characterizes their

captivity in the Open: Plant and animal depend on something outside of

themselves without ever seeing either the outside or the inside, i.e., without ever

seeing their being unconcealed in the free of being. On the one hand, captivation is

a more spellbinding and intense openness than any kind of human knowledge; on

the other, insofar as it is not capable of disconcealing its own disinhibitor, it is

closed in a total opacity. (Ibid; Pg 57)Agambens strategy is then to extend the concep "disinhibitor" to let it play a

constitutive function for Daseins own relation to being. For Agamben, both Dasein

and the animal have their own proper disinhibitors; the difference resides in that

for the former it is being itself which becomes its own disinhibitor, while the

animals disinhibitors remain shrouded in mystery, foreclosed to any ontologizing

function of disclosure (Ibid; Pg. 60). It is through the mediating function of the

non-ontological disinhibitors that Agamben locates the zone of indeterminacy

which broods between man and animal.

In particular, Agamben compares the animals closure to his own

disinhibitors to Daseins experience of a wholesale refusal of beings, such as lived

in profound boredom. As Agamben says, in becoming bored Dasein is delivered

over to something that refuses itself, exactly like the animal, in its captivation, is

exposed to something unrevealed." (Ibid; Pg. 65) This is the space of co-


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This gesture, we must insist, threatens to performatively contradict the

absolute anonymity of disinhibitors qua non-ontological valences, and thus their

separation from Daseins world. To claim disinhibitors constitute the most general

category proper for the common intentionality of both animal and Dasein alike is

just to relapse into a metaphysical reification of being, by claiming to know that

which separates the self-enclosed world of human being, and that which, oblivious

to it, concerns the animal only. The signifier 'disinhibitor' plays a paradoxical role

as that which cannotbe known by any human comportment, and that which allows

us,by considering it,to separate what it properly human from that which isn't. But

this is an irreconcilable duality: either one insists that being is a matter for Dasein

and therefore that it makes no sense to speak of non-human things, in pains of

paralogism, or one reactivates the metaphysical task and proceeds to typologize

being into categories. The former results in the kind of agnostic correlationism we

saw apropos Heidegger and Derrida, where the latter leads the slippery route

towards a kind of neo-Aristotelian metaphysics of substance and properties.

Just like Derrida, Agamben diagnoses in the specific relation of Dasein towards

being (his own brand of disinhibitor) the compulsion to disclose, which leads to

the forgetful technocratic unbecoming which seizes the anonymity of the Other into

the cog of human serviceability: "To be sure, such a humanity, from Heidegger's

perspective, no longer has the form of keeping itself open to the undisconcealed of

the animal, but seeks rather to open and secure the not-open in every domain, and

thus closes itself to its own openness forgets its humanitas, and makes being its

specific disinhibitor. The total humanization of the animal coincides with a total

animalization of man. (Agamben: 2004, Pg. 77)


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Whereas for Heidegger the compulsion to disclose coincides with the

ontotheologicalforgetfulness of being as such; for Derrida and Agamben it marks

the logocentric transgression proper to all ontology, and the biopolitical

obliviousness to how the co-constitution of man and animal wage biopolitical

power, respectively. The three agree in that the attempts to approach the animal

from the purview of scientific categories (which include metaphysical/ontological

concepts for Derrida/Agamben) underlie the anthropomorphizing distortion

against the animal. By the same token, they agree in that a reasonable ethics which

would let the animal be in its intractable Otherness requires a suspension of

invasive scientific practice, as the latter continues to enact an ireflexive violence

against the animal through the generality of the concept. Agamben puts it best,

when he says that to let the animal simply be would mean to let it be outside of

being (Ibid; Pg. 91).

However, neither Derrida nor Agamben seem content to accept utter apathy or

inertia towards the animal, such as in the purported three hundred years of

silence envisaged by Heidegger to repair the damage done by the tradition[18].For

Derrida, the ethics of letting be consists in generalizing the structure of privation

to Dasein, so as to dissolve the as such which grants the latter a horizon towards

being itself. It remains entirely undetermined what a practice correspondent to this

prescription would be, however, except in that it pulls red lights on philosophy as

much as science. For Agamben, the breakdown of the anthropological machine

would altogether suspend the divisions of bare Life which regulate biopower, the

better to show the empty kernel which lies at the center of the separation between

animal and man: The suspension of the suspension. Shabbat of both animal and


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man. (Ibid; Pg 92) What both thinkers share is an eventual agnosticism about the

animal in itself, now delimited away from the reach of thought; that is, not just as

unknowable, but as unthinkable. The figure retrieved is that of the animal outside

all essence (whatness, Wassein), without ontic specificity, or the figure of great

ignorance which lets both man and animal be in their incommensurable

difference.

Both Derrida and Agamben thus exacerbatethe relativization of conceptual

categorization to instrumentality or serviceability, which already for Heidegger

entailed the provisional suspension of scientific practice, and which signals for

Derrida the apex of our 'stupidity' before the Otherness that is the animal. As we

have seen, science was to be rehabilitated from its blind machinic drive after

metaphysical clarification had shown their co-dependence and continuity. For

Derrida and Agamben, even more so than the later Heidegger, metaphysics above

all is paradigmatic of the human arrogance which, by way of the politically invested

logos, attempts to close the unbridgeable abyss that separates man and animal, and

enacts an immeasurable violence against the latter. It is this philosophically nested

fixation on the ontologically invested logos which attempts to disclose what ought

to remain shrouded in mystery. The face in the sand that the human sciences

have drawn are thus to be eventually erased, Agamben concludes, in favor of an

avowal of the unsaveable mystery of separation which sets them forever apart

(Ibid).

Conclusion Science, Materiality, Animality


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In the end, what these post-Heideggerean approaches to the animal share is an

unremitting conviction that the circle of correlation is inescapable; that justice to

the animal can at best come in the way of a passive, ethical stance towards its

opaque Otherness rather than by an active, cognitive attempt to comprehend it.

Radicalizing the ontological difference, both Derrida and Agamben remain

skeptical towards conceptuality, rendering it void of its purported ontological

value, or overburdened by its biopolitical weight. Science or ontology cannot but be

speciesist, since they illegitimately transpose what is merely relative to us onto

things in themselves. They thereby renounce the prospect, envisaged still by the

early Heidegger, of an eventual thought of the essence of the animal, where

science and metaphysics would converge. Dissolving the logocentric as suchwhich

attempts to think the animal essence, or shattering the anthropological machine

which wagers power over Life, becomes thus continuous with the prescription of

releasement and letting be which brings science to a halt in its approach. What

one letsbe is finally the non-ontological Otherness of the animal, free from the

shackles of scientific/metaphysical instrumental reason.

An alternative approach to the animal could, by contrast, contest the primacy

of transcendental conditions of access, so as to describe an immanent plane of

material production, within a univocal ontological field. Such a perspective is

pursued by thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze or Alain Badiou. Under the formers

vitalist panpsychist view, everything emerges within ontological field of intensive

multiplicities, in which animal and man are actualized morphogenetically[19].For

Deleuze and his followers (Jane Bennett for example) this leads to the dissolution

of the ontologicalsplit between humans and animals by making them both partake


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in the same material ground. Deleuze dissolves the transcendental function of

representation and existential access, the better to introduce all beings into the

same process of differential becoming, which requires the restitution of ontology

against transcendental philosophy and its historicist/deconstructive offspring.

It is therefore the alternative of giving a positive ontology that does not begin

with the consideration of our fundamental accessto the world. It is this evasion of

the problematic of access in favor of metaphysics which is taken to have the

resources to overcome the anthropomorphizing function of representation and

conceptual identity, obviating the epistemological distinction between thinking and

reality, concept and object. Yet this alternative obviously raises questions about our

warrant in pursuing a metaphysics irrespective of methodological concerns about

access. I shall not press on these issues at this time, but simply indicate it as one

possible alternative.

For Badious (1996, 2006) radically anti-phenomenological mathematical

ontology, experience does not provide the conditions of access to ontic reality, as it

does for Deleuze. In a sense they both displace rather than resolve the critical

quandary by deflating, to its fullest extent, the problematic of our access to being in

favor of a purely abstract notion of being itself. Science then becomes a generic

procedure for the production of truths, while ontology is in turn taken to be

radically a-subjective, and just one more situation among many. But the subject

still separates from the animal at the point where it resists its local objectivity and

incorporates itself into a new truth-procedure, transcending his finitude and

ascending to the eternity of the Idea. Under this view, science accesses the being of

the animal precisely by virtue of its mathematicity; which Heidegger esteemed as


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the most empty and removed form of understanding. Endorsing the Parmenidean

identification of thinking and being, science can thus never fall into the crisis

envisaged by Heidegger as necessary, given its dubious foundation in human

experience: [T]here is no [phenomenological] subject of science. Infinitely

stratified, adjusting its transitions, science is a pure space, without a reverse or

mark or place of what it excludes. It is foreclosure, but foreclosure of nothing, and

so can be called the psychosis of no subject, hence of all; fully universal, shared

delirium, one only has to install oneself within it to become no-one, anonymously

dispersed in the hierarchy of orders. Science is an Outside without a blind-

spotThere are no crises within science. (Badiou: Mark and Lack, Pgs. 161-2)

The only subject for science is the very immanent productivity that is carried out

withinscience, rather a threat from outside of it.Yet another alternative route is to insist, contra-correlationism, that it is the

sciences which provide the material ground and the conditions for the instantiation

for huma

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The Animal Beyond Being