Unbecoming Human: Philosophy of Animality after Deleuze

233 Pages·2020·1.283 MB·English

by  Felice Cimatti

Unbecoming Human
Plateaus – New Directions in Deleuze Studies
‘It’s not a matter of bringing all sorts of things together under a single concept but rather of
relating each concept to variables that explain its mutations.’
Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations
Series Editors
Ian Buchanan, University of Wollongong
Claire Colebrook, Penn State University
Editorial Advisory Board
Keith Ansell Pearson, Ronald Bogue, Constantin V. Boundas, Rosi Braidotti, Eugene Holland,
Gregg Lambert, Dorothea Olkowski, Paul Patton, Daniel Smith, James Williams
Titles available in the series
Christian Kerslake, Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy: From Kant to Deleuze
Jean-Clet Martin, Variations: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, translated by Constantin V.
Boundas and Susan Dyrkton
Simone Bignall, Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism
Miguel de Beistegui, Immanence – Deleuze and Philosophy
Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature
Ronald Bogue, Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History
Sean Bowden, The Priority of Events: Deleuze’s Logic of Sense
Craig Lundy, History and Becoming: Deleuze’s Philosophy of Creativity
Aidan Tynan, Deleuze’s Literary Clinic: Criticism and the Politics of Symptoms
Thomas Nail, Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo
François Zourabichvili, Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event with The Vocabulary of Deleuze
edited by Gregg Lambert and Daniel W. Smith, translated by Kieran Aarons
Frida Beckman, Between Desire and Pleasure: A Deleuzian Theory of Sexuality
Nadine Boljkovac, Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema
Daniela Voss, Conditions of Thought: Deleuze and Transcendental Ideas
Daniel Barber, Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future
of Immanence
F. LeRon Shults, Iconoclastic Theology: Gilles Deleuze and the Secretion of Atheism
Janae Sholtz, The Invention of a People: Heidegger and Deleuze on Art and the Political
Marco Altamirano, Time, Technology and Environment: An Essay on the Philosophy
of Nature
Sean McQueen, Deleuze and Baudrillard: From Cyberpunk to Biopunk
Ridvan Askin, Narrative and Becoming
Marc Rölli, Gilles Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism: From Tradition to Difference,
translated by Peter Hertz-Ohmes
Guillaume Collett, The Psychoanalysis of Sense: Deleuze and the Lacanian School
Ryan J. Johnson, The Deleuze-Lucretius Encounter
Allan James Thomas, Deleuze, Cinema and the Thought of the World
Cheri Lynne Carr, Deleuze’s Kantian Ethos: Critique as a Way of Life
Alex Tissandier, Affirming Divergence: Deleuze’s Reading of Leibniz
Barbara Glowczewski, Indigenising Anthropology with Guattari and Deleuze
Koichiro Kokubun, The Principles of Deleuzian Philosophy, translated by Wren Nishina
Felice Cimatti, Unbecoming Human: Philosophy of Animality After Deleuze, translated by
Fabio Gironi
Ryan J. Johnson, Deleuze, A Stoic
Forthcoming volumes
Justin Litaker, Deleuze and Guattari’s Political Economy
Nir Kedem, A Deleuzian Critique of Queer Thought: Overcoming Sexuality
Jane Newland, Deleuze in Children’s Literature
Sean Bowden, Expression, Action and Agency in Deleuze: Willing Events
Andrew Jampol-Petzinger, Deleuze, Kierkegaard and the Ethics of Selfhood
Visit the Plateaus website at edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/plat
UNBECOMING HUMAN
Philosophy of Animality After Deleuze
2
Felice Cimatti
Translated by Fabio Gironi
Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish
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English translation © Fabio Gironi, 2020
© 2013, Gius. Laterza & Figli, All rights reserved
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Published with a contribution from the Department of Humanistic Studies of the
University of Calabria.
Contents
Introduction: Animals Do Not Exist 1
1 Animal? 24
2 The Anthropologic Machine 43
3 Rage and Envy 63
4 To Be Seen 87
5 Becoming-human 110
6 The Artistic Beast 132
7 Becoming-animal 152
8 Beyond the Apparatus 170
Coda 189
Bibliography 207
Index 223

Introduction: Animals Do Not Exist
Bien sûr, l’homme fut animal; et pourtant il ne l’est plus
[Of course, man was an animal; and yet he is no longer]
(Bimbenet 2011: 22)
Animals are not others. Let us be clear about this: Unbecoming
Human is neither exclusively nor mainly about nonhuman animals
– like cats and jellyfish. The book you are holding deals with our
animality, with human animality. Unbecoming Human attempts to
delineate the still-unknown features of human animality. That is to
say, all those inhuman characters that must be cut off by the appa-
ratus (the ‘anthropologic machine’, as Agamben defines it) through
which we become human, for otherwise we could neither become, nor
define ourselves as, human. The double process of de- animalisation
on the one hand and linguisticisation on the other, which we all
must go through (for otherwise we could not be defined as properly
human), produces a peculiar entity: the human psychological subject.
The subject – which, as we will see, is nothing but a body referring to
itself as an ‘I’ – speaks, and only in virtue of this is it indeed a subject.
For this reason, animality concerns language: on the one hand lan-
guage engenders the ‘subject’, on the other animality is animal (i.e.,
nonhuman) precisely because it is not traversed by language.
The purpose of this book, then, is that of describing the difficult
– if not impossible – relationship established between Homo sapiens
and other animals (and animality in general) from different points of
view: those of philosophy, science, art, literature, cinema, and psy-
choanalysis. This relationship is impossible more than it is difficult
because, ultimately, Homo sapiens simply means ‘the living being
that is not an animal’ or ‘the living being that continuously expels
its own animality’. However, since every individual of the species
Homo sapiens is, clearly, an animal – a vertebrate and a mammal,
to be precise – to be human also means to be something intrinsically
contradictory. It follows, therefore, that Unbecoming Human will
also deal with nonhuman animals, but only insofar as this will help
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unbecoming human
in drawing the contours of human animality. When we speak of
animality, therefore, we should certainly think about animals, but
also – and perhaps mainly – about all those circumstances wherein
something eludes the grasp of thoughts and words. Animality avoids
our grasp, it cannot be captured; it is indeed the very elusiveness
of life. It is for this reason that we will find animality in the most
unsuspected places, where we would never think of encountering it,
since animality abides even where no animals dwell.
In order to track human animality, however, it is necessary to
start from that of nonhuman animals. This book will, then, also deal
with cats and jellyfish. As Derrida (2008) warned us, this is a risky
operation. Because the animal of which we speak is never the animal
as it is in and of itself: the animal is always an ‘animot’, the spoken-of
animal, metaphorised and idealised. That is, it is always the animal
as thought and feared by human beings. In this sense, as we will
see, the animal does not exist. In fact, the ‘animot’ is literally made
up by language, since our talking about animals (humans always
talk about animals, and indeed it could be said that they invented
language in order to speak about animals, and distance themselves
from them) requires the hypothesis that, in the world, a referent for
the word ‘animal’ can be found. The concept of ‘animot’ allows us to
subvert the common supposition according to which language simply
nominates objects, independently existing in the world. As Derrida,
like Hegel before him, observes, there are no cats, or viruses, in the
world. Rather there is this living being in front of my eyes, or this
particular virus that I can examine through the lenses of an electronic
microscope. Clearly, the animal does not exist. Indeed, the category
animal is a linguistic invention. We will return time and again to the
relationship between language and animality, but for now it should
be clear that the question of animality cannot be separated from that
of language.
Let us come back to how to talk about animality. We have just
seen that this is an unknown animality – still and perhaps forever
unknown. This does not mean questioning the many scientific dis-
coveries that have put our belonging to the animal kingdom beyond
any doubt. But this is not the point. Darwin notwithstanding, the
definition of the humanity of the human always implies, more or less
explicitly, a radical differentiation from the world of animals. Even
in prehistoric human cultures, for example, ‘animals act primarily
as metaphors’ (Russell 2012: 11). An animal is a metaphor when it
functions as a mere ‘vehicle’ for a meaning that transcends it. Thus,
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Introduction: Animals Do Not Exist
the flesh-and-blood living creature vanishes, and becomes an abstract
and symbolic entity, an animot. In particular, the animal-metaphor
is used by the human in order to think and to think itself: so, every
thought about the animal necessarily oscillates between anthropo-
centrism and anthropomorphism (Russell 2012: 4). That is to say
between, on the one hand, a thought about the animal that always
refers back to the human standard, a thought that completely ignores
all that, in the animal, cannot be referred to the human; and, on the
other hand, a thought that attributes to the animal its own character-
istics, and that therefore can only discern that which is attributed to
it. But this means that there has never been a time when, for human
beings, the animal was just an animal, and the human another animal
among animals. If, since the beginning, the animal was a metaphor,
then the animal was never an animal. As always, there was never a
beginning, since every ‘beginning’ keeps beginning again and again,
and was never a pure origin:
This is the original mythologem and, at the same time, the aporia the
speaking subject clashes with: language presupposes something nonlin-
guistic, and this something unrelated is presupposed, however, by giving
it a name. The tree presupposed in the name ‘tree’ cannot be expressed
in language; we can only speak of it starting from its having a name.
(Agamben 2018b: 3)
The animal is the prototype of this unreachable non-linguistic origin;
on the one hand there is no doubt that the human is an animal, and
indeed both Homo sapiens and its language derive from this non-
linguistic presupposition. But on the other hand this non-linguistic
foundation enters the representational field simply as an ‘animal’,
i.e., as a word, as language and representation. The unrepresent-
able is only present qua linguistic representation. Thus, the animal is
both wild and domesticated, unsayable and metaphorised, constantly
elided but always recalled, since ‘we can think a being entirely without
relation to language only through a language without any relation to
being’ (Agamben 2018b: 3). Homo sapiens is this aporia. It is impos-
sible, or at least counterproductive, to think the animal and ignore
the fact that this is always an animot. From this point of view the
contemporary animal and nonhuman turns (Ritvo 2007; Weil 2010;
Grusin 2015; Ingold 2016; Bjørkdahl and Parrish 2018) must come
to terms with this paradox, intrinsic to any discourse on the animal.
It is now necessary to consider a few examples, in order to high-
light the traps that await every reflection on animality. In §55 of his
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