Ways of Being Alive. Baptiste Morizot
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Название: Ways of Being Alive

Автор: Baptiste Morizot

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Афоризмы и цитаты

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isbn: 9781509547227

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СКАЧАТЬ way as they do. It requires the equivalent of ferrymen or smugglers: animals are intercessors with this kind of power.

      And yet we inherit a conception of the world that has downgraded the animal; this is clearly visible in our language, which crystallizes our mental reflexes. All those expressions – ‘to treat someone like an animal’, ‘they behaved like mere animals’ – the whole ladder of contempt, the whole vertical metaphor of the overcoming of an inferior animal nature within us, can be found even in the most everyday corners of our ethics, of our self-representation. It’s incredible. And yet these expressions rest on a metaphysical misunderstanding. Hence the third text in this collection, which tracks our inner animal nature through the history of a Western morality that enjoins us to tame our wild impulses.

      These complicated relationships with animal life partly originate in the stranglehold of a dualist philosophical anthropology, which runs from Judeo-Christianity to Freudianism. This Western conception thinks of animal nature as an interior bestiality that humans must overcome in order to ‘civilize’ themselves or, on the contrary, as a purer primal nature from which they replenish themselves, thereby finding a more authentic wildness, freed from social norms. These two imaginaries seem opposed, while nothing could be less true: the latter is merely the reverse of the former, constructed as a symmetrical and opposite reaction. However, we know that reactive creations simply perpetuate the Weltanschauung of the enemy that is forcing us to react: in this case, the hierarchical dualism that contrasts humans with animals.

      What this demands of us is quite mind-blowing. The outside of each term of a dualism is never its opposite term; it is the outside of the dualism itself. Leaving behind all that is Civilized is not to throw oneself into the Wild, any more than leaving Progress implies giving in to Collapse: it means leaving the opposition between the two. It means breaking open the world thought of as their binary and undivided reign. It means entering a world that is not organized, structured, rendered fully intelligible on the basis of these categories. The challenge is to cut like the blade of a sword between the two blocks of dualisms, to emerge on the other side of the world they claim to enclose, and see what lies behind. It’s an art of dodging: we have to fly like a butterfly to avoid being captured by the twin monoliths of Nature and Culture, falling from the Charybdis that is Man with a capital M into the Scylla of the Homogenized Animal, the cult of wild nature as opposed to the cult of the necessary improvement of nature when it needs repair work. We must dance between the ropes, dodging the dualism of animal nature as both inferior bestiality and as superior purity. We must open up a hitherto unexplored space: that of worlds to be invented once we have passed to the other side. We must glimpse them, show them: take a deep breath of fresh air.

      It is the ‘other’ that is essential. It expresses a whole quiet logic of difference against a background of common ascent. It’s a quiet grammatical revolution that’s happening – the revolution that sees the addition of one little word flourishing in all those everyday sentences: ‘human beings and animals’, ‘the difference from animals’, ‘what an animal does not have’ …

      The one little word is ‘other’. ‘The differences between humans and other animals.’ ‘What that other animal doesn’t have.’ ‘What humans have in common with other animals.’

      Imagine all the possible sentences and add the word other. A very small adjective, so elegant in its cartographic reconfiguration of the world: it alone reframes both a logic of difference and a common belonging. It traces bridges and open borders between the beings encountered in experience. Nobody will lose anything in the process. It certainly does not allow us to make any in-depth progress when it comes to similarities and differences. It simply makes it possible to naturalize an adequate logic, to avoid a gross error in biological taxonomy, to incorporate (as a civilization) a mental map with far-reaching political repercussions, and to internalize (as individuals) one more quiet truth, one that will join the roundness of the Earth, heliocentrism, evolutionism, the toxicity of neoliberalism, and the idea that democracy is the worst political model … except for all the others.

      The point is to see the countless forms of animal nature and our countless relationships to them on cultural and political levels as an adult topic. Animal nature is a big question: the enigma of being a human grows clearer, more liveable, and more alive, in the light of the countless animal life forms that face us as enigmas. And the quintessential political enigma of living together in a world of otherness finds other implications, and other resources, in those life forms.

      But it is clear that openness and sensibility towards living beings, these arts of attention in their own right, are often relegated to the status of bourgeois, aesthetic, or conservative issues by those who campaign for other possible worlds. They are in fact powerfully political matters.

      These arts of attention are political, for the discreet and pre-institutional essence of the political sphere is played out in the shifting thresholds that dictate what deserves our attention. The question of feminism has highlighted these shifts in recent decades, and the issue of gender difference has suddenly become a political landmark attracting considerable attention. The question of alienated labour, the question of the condition of all those who do not have the means of production but sell their labour power, is a question that was naturalized in early capitalism, and became – with Marx and after him – an object of the most searching collective attention. The tectonic shifts in the art of the attention of a human collective are highlighted by one eloquent symptom: this is the feeling of the tolerable and the intolerable.