References Agamben, G. (2004), The Open: Man and Animal, translated by Attel, K., Stanford University Press: Stanford. Ardrey, R. (1976), The Hunting Hypothesis: A Personal Conclusion Concerning the Evolutionary Nature of Man, Atheneum: New York. Auel, J. M. (1980), The Mammoth Hunters, Coronet Books: Sevenoaks. Bataille, G. (2005), The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, Kendall, S. (Ed.), translated by Kendall, M. and Kendall, S., Zone Books: New York. Cartmill, M. (1996), A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature through History, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, London. Chrulew, M. (2011), “Reversing Extinction: Restoration and Resurrection in the Pleistocene Rewilding Projects”, Humanimalia 2, 2, pp. 4-27. Chrulew, M. (forthcoming), Mammoth, Reaktion Books: London. Derrida, J. (1991), “‘Eating Well,’ or the Valculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida”, translated by Connor, P. and Ronell, A., in Cadava, E., Connor, P. and J.-L. (Eds) Who comes after the subject? Routledge: New York, pp. 96-119. Flannery, T. (2001), The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and its Peoples, Text Publishing: Melbourne. Foucault, M. (1998), The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, translated by Hurley, R., Penguin Books: London. Martin, P. S. (1967), “Pleistocene Overkill”, Natural History, 76, pp. 32-38. Martin, P. S. (2005), Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America, University of California Press: Berkeley. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1998), The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and of a Cultural Icon, The University of Chicago Press: London. Smith, M. (2001) “Environmental Anamnesis: Walter Benjamin and the Ethics of Extinction”, Environmental Ethics, 23, pp. 359-376.
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But if there is no original, no point, no body, no beginning of beginnings from which it all started, then womb, too, is already a repetition, a becoming, an unfolding. Womb and water; water and womb. Watery life gestating possibilities for other watery life yet-to-come, for life that might-not-have-been. Repetition 10: Water/Milieu “Evolution,” Deleuze reminds us, “does not take place in the open air” (1994: 118). As researcher Matthew Fletcher notes, "The marine environment is a realm of biological and chemical diversity, and marine organisms... are a rich source of intriguing and unusual molecules with the potential to become powerful drugs" (BBC, 2005). Musing on hermaphroditic fish, Roughgarden wonders why it is that oceanic environments, unlike life on land, that seem to be so accommodating—and even facilitative of—diverse sexuality (31). What repeats? An exterior milieu, now folded inside. Not only the sea, but a congeries of bodies, of species, each the evolutionary gestational milieu for an other. We are all watery bodies, constantly selecting, reinventing, repeating one another, from precipitation to primordial soup. Repetition 11: Oikos The anti-cancer drugs derived from sea squirt compounds inaugurate flows of power between ascidian life, specific bodies in pain, and multinational pharmaceutical companies. To whose advantage are sea squirt bodies being commandeered? is Greek for “dwelling” and becomes the prefix “eco” that is common to both ecology (the logic of dwelling) and economy (the management of dwelling)” (Chen,
Developed across Infancy and History (1978), Language and Death (1982), The Idea of Prose (1985) and Remnants of Auschwitz (1998), “infancy” describes an experience of language beyond the logic of inclusive exclusion, an experience of potentiality rather than violent exposure. Agamben’s recurrent figure of infantile potentiality is the axolotl, or “Mexican walking fish,” an amphibian that retains juvenile characteristics (gills) even after the development of adult traits (lungs and reproductive organs). With this figure of an “eternal child,” Agamben suggests that a new relation between human and non-human animals might emerge via a new childlike experience of language. While the axolotl is a curious and clarifying figure, in this essay, I argue that the amphibian betrays the limitations of infancy for any Shabbat of animal and man beyond the anthropological machine. On my reading of the axolotl, Agamben conflates infantile potentiality with infantile independence and, in this way, abstracts early experiences of language from important experiences of dependence (like the relation of children to their mothers). While Agamben would like to disconnect the constitution of language from its dependence on violence (against non-human animals), his attempt to locate language in a radical independence bears a violence of its own. Instead of jamming the anthropological machine, infancy re-functions it. If Agamben is to provide more than critical offerings for the field of critical animal studies, I argue that he must more thoroughly “risk [himself] in the emptiness” of a Shabbat both animal and man. To transform relations between human and non-human animals Agamben must attend to the vulnerable, dependent, risky that condition experiences of language. From the Anthropological Machine to Infantile Potentiality The Open begins with a mysterious image found in a Hebrew Bible in Milan’s Ambrosian Library. The image depicts “the messianic banquet of the righteous on the last day” but instead of human faces, the righteous are represented with animal heads—“the eagle’s fierce beak, the red head of the ox and the lion’s head.” For Agamben, this image stands as a promise that, “on the last day, relations between animals and men will take on a new form, and that man himself will be reconciled
with his animal nature” (2004: 2-3). In effect, the righteous symbolize the end of the anthropological machine and its logic of inclusive exclusion; according to this violent machinating logic, “the speaking man places his own muteness outside himself, as already and not yet human,” and conserves the animal other in the heart of the human (35). Much of The Open proceeds, then, as a critique of philosophies that assign language to man over and against the animal. In its most accessible discussion, Agamben analyzes evolutionary theories of language and their anxiety over a stage of human evolution. In its most extended and complicated engagement, Agamben focuses on The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics and Heidegger’s attempt to define the world-relation of humans and animals. According to Agamben, Heidegger’s Dasein retains an anthropological gesture, conserving, by suspending, a relation to “animal captivation.” Agamben’s reading of Heidegger elucidates his notion of infancy as a “suspension of suspension.” Because each involves the uncovering of an inclusive exclusion, Agamben’s critique of Heidegger is analogous to his critique of evolutionary theory. In the latter, he finds and follows an anxiety over the human being that cannot speak—the “ape-man.” Demonstrating the contradictions that the “ape-man” presents to Darwin’s readers, Agamben quotes evolutionary linguist Heymann Steinthal: We have invented a stage of man that precedes language. But of course this is only a fiction; for language is so necessary and natural for the human being, that without it man can neither truly exist nor be thought of as existing. Either man has language, or he simply is not. On the other hand—and this justifies the fiction—language nevertheless cannot be regarded as already inherent in the human soul … it is a stage of the soul’s development and requires a deduction from the preceding stages. But why the human soul alone builds this bridge, why man alone and not the animal progresses through language from animality to humanity[?] (Agamben, 2004: 36) According to Agamben (and in the admission of Steinthal several years later), evolutionary theory is unable to answer the question it poses itself regarding the relation between the animal and the “animal-man.” That is, evolutionary theorists fail