Theoria

Much scholarship in “animal studies” distinguishes between the “human animal” and the “non-human animal.” The point, I suppose, is to indicate that the human also includes the animal. However, what is the purpose, then, in calling an animal – say, a groundhog – a non-human animal? If the “human” is something “added” to the “animal,” wouldn’t it follow that anything that is not “human” would simply be “animal”? Further, if “animal studies” in general tries to (1) point to the role of animals within society and how social relations are often mediated by and through animals and (2) to move away from an anthropocentric account of human relations, why would the groundhog (or hawk) be referred to as the “non-human” animal? Doesn’t the term “non-human” reinscribe the “human” in relation to the “animal;” that is, precisely what “animal studies” attempts to reject?

Similarly, Warren Montag suggests (in a paper that has not yet been published leading into a project he hasn’t yet begun) a distinction between the “human” and the “inhuman.” His point here is to make sense of how, for instance, some animals in Locke’s essays on state of nature are more human than what we would ordinarily imagine to be human; i.e., savages. However, this once again reinscribes the human as the privileged point of reference – rather odd for someone who is both a Spinozist and an Althusserian! (I hope to write something on this paper in the next few days.)

Both positions – the human/non-human and the human/inhuman – seem to take Aristotle’s definition of man as their point of departure: man is an animal plus something else (for Aristotle, political). But, as Aristotle admits, this definition soon breaks down because there are a number of animals who seem to possess something analogous to human communities – ants, bees, etc. Hence, some animals seem to be quasi-political and, therefore, neither quite human nor quite animal. Definitions of this sort result in man being “animal plus something else” while animals being “man minus something else.”

Without getting into details – largely because I don’t know what those details may be! – there might be a solution to this problem through (1) Spinoza’s “modes”; (2) Althusser’s “history as a process without a subject”; (3) and Foucault’s analytic of bodies as a set of force relations. The only coherent position a serious “animal studies” can take is an anti-humanist position. However, even the term “anti-humanist” is with reference to the human.