ARISTOTLE AND ADORNO Caleb J. Basnett A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY ...

604 Pages·2015·2.55 MB·English

by  Caleb Basnett

POLITICS AND THE AESTHETIC ANIMAL:

ARISTOTLE AND ADORNO

Caleb J. Basnett

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO
THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES
IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN POLITICAL SCIENCE,
YORK UNIVERSITY
TORONTO, ONATRIO

FEBRUARY, 2015

© Caleb J. Basnett, 2015
Abstract

This study examines the neglected role of other animals and art in Aristotle’s
classic conception of the human being, and argues that the work of T.W. Adorno
can be drawn upon to recover this conception’s neglected promise. By reading
Aristotle’s oft-cited claim that ‘the human being is by nature a political animal’ in
light of his works on biology and poetics, I find that Aristotle displaces ideas
concerning the role of human being in the cosmos prominent in the Ancient
Greek world, binding the self-understanding of human beings to other animals
and the arts. This self-understanding can be summarized as follows: 1) Aristotle
recognizes that humans are not the only political animals, and provides the
rudiments of a theory concerning how nonhuman politics might be possible; and
2) Aristotle’s theory of nature is unintelligible without artistic metaphors that
suggest the creative power of the arts to produce what we understand to be
human, not simply in terms of revealing natural human capacities, but in creating
these capacities in the first place.
Though largely unappreciated by his descendants, detractors, and even Aristotle
himself, I argue these insights can be recovered through Adorno’s critical theory.
Adorno enables us to grasp the creative power of art in the construction of the
human being and the distance it can place between humans and other animals
while at once allowing us to see how a turn toward the repressed possibilities
upon which the emergence of the human depends is also a turn toward animality.
In this sense, the promise of humanity and its legacy concerns less a defense of
the classical humanism being eroded by the vicissitudes of history, than the
possibility of uncovering the paths not followed by this tradition that might
inform posthuman subjective possibilities more able to confront the challenges of
the present. In this way, Adorno enables the theorization of an aesthetic animal,
the subject of a radically transformed society.
ii
Acknowledgements
During my time at York working on this project I have incurred numerous debts
to professors, colleagues, and friends for their help and support, a few of which I
would like to highlight here. Firstly, I would like to thank my committee,
especially my supervisor Asher Horowitz, and readers Shannon Bell and Martin
Breaugh, for their time and their helpful comments and criticisms. I also owe my
thanks to the examiners, Stephen Newman, J.J. McMurtry, and Andrew Biro,
both for their insightful comments, and for their willingness to take on this
project in the first place.

Secondly, I would like to thank past and present colleagues at York, Jordan
Brennan, Cohen Brown, Elliott Buckland, Karl Dahlquist, Jason Harman, Paul
Herbert, Christopher Holman, Arthur Imperial, Nadia Hasan, Rachel
Magnusson, Paul Mazzocchi, James McMahon, Devin Penner, and Daniel Ross,
for time spent arguing over coffee or beer, and their general camaraderie. York
would not have been the experience it was had it not been for them.

Lastly, I would like to thank my family: my partner Nagisa, and our children,
Taiyo and Hazuki, for never jumping ship, even when icebergs loomed, and my
friends Mike Blezy, Alex Buchinski, Max Capelliez, Ian Mackell, the Onishi
family, and Sheela Subramanian, for tolerating me all these years. I ought also to
note the unrepayable debt owed to my parents, Wendy and Richard, and my
sisters, Caitlin and Cassandra, and their families.

Try as one might, none of the aforementioned can be held responsible for the
various inadequacies of this study, for which I take sole responsibility.

iii
Table of Contents

Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………………………ii
Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………………….iii
Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………………………iv

Chapter One: Introduction…………………………………………………………………………….1
A Sketch in Triptych………………………………………………………………………….......1
Humans, Animals, and Art in Political Theory……………………………................8
A Forecast……………………………………………………………………………………………21

Part I: Art, Aesthetics, and the Human-Animal Divide.........................................26
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..26

Chapter Two: The Posteriority of the Human……………………………….……………….32
Rancière……………………………………………………………………………………………..32
Nancy………………………………………………………………………………………………….39
Agamben…………………………………………………………………………………………….42
The Posteriority of the Human………………………………………………………………45

Chapter Three: The Priority of Art: Heidegger and Nietzsche…………………………47
The Origin of the Work of Art………………………………………………………………..48
The Birth of Tragedy…………………………………………………………………………….58
The Will to Power…………………………………………………………………………………64

Chapter Four: Art, Aesthetics, and Animality:
Between Heidegger and Nietzsche………………………………………………………….71
Foucault………………………………………………………………………………………………73
Agamben…………………………………………………………………………………………….78
Deleuze……………………………………………………………………………………………….83
Derrida……………………………………………………………………………………………….90
Conclusion: Back to Aristotle………………………………………………………………..98

Part II: Aristotle on Animality and the Human Being:
The Biological Writings……………………………………………………………………….105
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………106

Chapter Five: Humans and Animals in the World of Poetic Myth………………....115
From Homer to the Tragedians…………………………………………………………….115
Plato the Tragedian?......................................................................................128
iv
Chapter Six: What is an Animal? Aristotle on Human Animality…………………..142
From the Soul to the Body…………………………………………………………………..143
Life Activity, Psychic Potential, and Politics…………………………………………..151

Chapter Seven: What is Humanity? The Human Excess………………………………169
Thought and the Intellectual Powers…………………………………………………….170
The Human Senses…………………………………………………………………………….180
The Human Body……………………………………………………………………………….183
Monsters……………………………………………………………………………………………191

Chapter Eight: Human Plurality and Inequality………………………………………….199
On Sexual Difference………………………………………………………………………….201
‘Low Sorts’ and the Physical Features of the Best Human……………………….212
Conclusion: Knowledge, Sensation, Animality, and Art………………………….220

Part III: Art, Politics, and the Best Human Life in Aristotle………………………….227
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………227

Chapter Nine: Natural Artifice and the Artifice of Nature………………………........237
The Artificial Body……………………………………………………………………………..238
Nature as Artist………………………………………………………...............................242

Chapter Ten: Art and the Most Choiceworthy Life………………..……………………..248
Beauty, Labor, and Leisure………………………………………………………………….249
Tragedy and the Best Life in the Poetics……………………………………………….262

Chapter Eleven: Tragedy and Contemplative Action…………………………………….275
Thought as Action: Tragic Speech………………………………………………………..277
Theory as Action: Tragic Spectatorship………………………………………………..286
Equity and Justice in Polity…………………………………………………………………303
Conclusion: From Aristotle to Adorno………………………………………………….316

Part IV: Enter Adorno, Stage Left……………………………………………......................331
Introduction: Adorno and Some Assorted Technical Problems
Concerning Time-Travel……………………………………………………………………..331

Chapter Twelve: Jewgreek is greekjew:
Aristotle, Hegel, and Adorno on the Perils of Dialectic…………………………..343
Adorno’s Aristotle………………………………………………………………………………343
Non-Identity and Dialectic………………………………………………………………….359
Constellation of Objects.................................................................................370

v
Chapter Thirteen: Adorno on Humanism and the Human Being…………………..382
Humane Humanity…………………………………………………………………………….387
Reconciled Humanity…………………………………………………………………………394
The Question of Progress……………………………………………………………………400

Chapter Fourteen: Relatively Modest Horrors: Adorno and Animals……………..411
Anthropology, Dialectical and Otherwise……………………………………………..416
Animal Violence in Human Constitution………………………………………………431
Non-Identity as Human Animality……………………………………………………….447
The Utopian Animal…………………………………………………………………………..459

Chapter Fifteen: The Politics of an Aesthetic Animal……………………………………476
Mimesis…………………………………………………………………………………………….485
Morality and Politics…………………………………………………………………………..497
The Inhuman Addendum…………………………………………………………………….510
Inhuman Art………………………………………………………………………………………523
Animal Technique………………………………………………………………………………543

Chapter Sixteen: Conclusion………………………………………………………………………557
The Animality of Human Plurality and Other Suffering Animals…………….560
Future Avenues, Possibilities……………………………………………………………….569
Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………......................577

vi
Chapter One: Introduction
A Sketch in Triptych
In The Time Machine (1895), H.G. Wells describes the feeling of time travel as
“excessively unpleasant”: one is hurtled through time in a “helpless headlong
motion” as if riding a “switchback,” gripped by a “nightmare sensation of falling”
and “horrible anticipation” of “an imminent smash.”1 The world in which Wells’
time traveler finds himself proves worthy of these premonitory sensations, for it
is a world wherein the working class, driven into a troglodytic existence, has
returned to prey on its erstwhile oppressors. In Wells’ future the poor finally eat
the rich, though history is ironic enough to avoid the rudeness of cannibalism—
they have, in this distant future, become different species.
While there is much that might be said of this tangle of ideas, what I wish
to extract here is the idea that socio-political domination is bound up with nature,
and that ‘time travel’ might reveal the transformations undergone by humans in
relation to other animals—that the natural or even permanent appearance of
humanity in any single image might, through the juxtaposition with others, reveal
history through their frayed edges. With Wells, then, we might become time
travelers in order to glimpse the three images of humanity, which, together, form
the triptych that I claim intimates something of the transformation of the self-

1 H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, ed. Nicholas Ruddick (Peterborough: Broadview, 2001), 76-77.
1
understanding of human nature through history, and its relation to socio-political
domination. If we have the stomach, then, we might leap:
Venice, circa 1550. Tintoretto’s The Creation of Animals depicts part of
the creation story found in the Book of Genesis. An anthropomorphic God is
suspended above the earth, as if having leapt into the air: the upper-half of His
body bent forward, His right hand extended. It is an active, theatrical pose—
perhaps too much so, for a God who need only speak for it to be so. He is dressed
in a blue robe and red cloak, and around His body is a kind of aura of light,
delineating His separation and independence from the world of His creation, and
which appears arranged around Him. There is a clear distinction between land,
sky, and sea, and each is teeming: beasts of the field, birds of the air, fish of the
sea. All appear to be moving at His behest, in straight lines even; they are
ordered in a world and occupy a particular place in it according to their kind in
the manner designated by their Creator, who stands apart from them.
Beneath this image another stirs, as if the first were a kind of palimpsest,
for Tintoretto based the composition of this piece upon a painting completed only
some thirty years earlier in the same city: Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (c. 1523).
Here it is Bacchus who is suspended in mid-air, having leapt from his chariot
towards Ariadne, who is dressed in a blue robe and red cloak. In his wake is a
procession of other figures, including animals, creatures half-human and half-
animal, and others who at a glance could be either god or human. Unlike the
2
order built on the clear symmetry of the positioning of the animals and the
prominence of their Creator in Tintoretto, Titian gives us here an image of
disorder, of unruliness—not quite chaos, for Bacchus does appear to occupy a
position of authority among his horde, but his position appears relative and
unstable. Confronted with this procession, Ariadne’s fate is also unclear: will she
be recruited by this mob, or even made its Lord? Or will they enslave her, or tear
her apart and devour her, as they appear to have done a calf whose remains they
parade around as trophies? The image, shorn of other knowledge of her story,
does not say.
In Tintoretto we see the dominant interpretation of the human-animal
distinction as it is found in the Christian tradition. Though, strictly speaking, no
human appears in the painting, insofar as “man” was made in the image of God
and it is this special relation to God that sets him apart from other animals, we
might see humans as occupying an analogical position to God in the painting, as
creatures who, made in the image of God, share in His dominion over animals.
Humans may, like animals, be in the world, but their relation to God means that
they are not of the world: the realization of their properly human nature extends
beyond the world of animals, and toward the eternal and divine. This division of
human from animal through divine proximity strips the animal of the possibility
of making moral claims. At best, the mistreatment of the animal can be seen as
wrong due to what it does to the human agent involved: that the human either
3
violates divine law or fails to rise to its semi-divine stature when it mistreats
others—these others do not matter in their own right.
Yet this image draws upon another, very different image: the world of
Greek mythology as it is captured by Titian. Here the line between human,
animal, and god is far from clearly drawn, and we have no reason to believe it is
stable. The remains of an animal are being bandied about—so it is not a world
without violence—but other animals occupy different positions, and there is no
indication that one is fundamentally different from another. That is, there is no
evidence that a human could not occupy the position of an animal, or an animal,
the position of a human, and the gods and other creatures appear to circulate
between these two categories, occupying one and then the other as they desire.
Thus the relation here between human and animal takes on different shapes
particular to context: the animal might represent a foe to be subdued, or a
potential friend whose allegiance must be secured through various rites; what
matters is how the relation with the animal might secure or threaten one’s own
status as human and so define the kind of human one is.
Despite the apparent incongruity of these images, their historical and
geographical proximity betrays their hidden unity. This image of an unruly
separation between human and animal, where each appear to be continuous with
the other in some important way, lies beneath the image of orderly separation
according to the design of the Creator, and is never quite excised by the latter.
4