Abstract
One of the simplest ways that we have historically evinced the link between humans and other animals is by using animal terms to describe human behavior. The existence of animal metaphors in everyday parlance seems to testify overtly to our kinship with other animals. But rather than revealing our otherwise obscured affiliation between humans and animals, the animal terms used to describe human behavior paradoxically reveal our distinctiveness from the animal world—the excessiveness of subjectivity. We do not describe the everyday or typical actions of humans in animal terms but reserve these metaphors for human extremes, and this tendency reveals what is at work in such descriptions.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for instance, Creation Minute at http://creationminute.com/
- 2.
Freud characterizes Darwin’s discovery of natural selection as one of the great wounds to human narcissism, along with the Copernican discovery of heliocentrism and his own discovery of the unconscious .
- 3.
In the Politics, Aristotle formulates a homology between the distinction between human and animal on the one side, and man and woman or master and slave on the other. He claims: ‘Whereas the lower animals cannot even apprehend reason; they obey their passions. And indeed the use made of slaves and of tame animals is not very different; for both with their body minister to the needs of life.’ Aristotle , Politics, trans. B. Jowett, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 1:5. Reason becomes the justification for all social hierarchies in Aristotle’s political philosophy. The gift of reason frees men from occupying themselves with the needs of life and enables them to establish themselves as political beings.
- 4.
This is the position developed most prominently by Thomas Aquinas. For Aquinas, there is no fundamental difference between laws of nature and moral laws because morality follows from humanity’s rational nature.
- 5.
Kant does call the subject’s capacity to give itself a law the fact of reason, but it is reason in its practical use, not reason as the source of calculation.
- 6.
Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XVI: D’un Autre à l’Autre, 1968–1969, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2006), p. 19.
- 7.
Judith Butler theorizes the process of the subject attaching itself to the constraint of the law in The Psychic Life of Power, where she claims, ‘there is no formation of the subject without a passionate attachment to subjection.’ Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 67.
- 8.
Birds build nests to house their young but do not make the building of nests into an end in itself. In contrast, I can transform even an activity as banal as trading stocks into an end that I enjoy. As Hannah Arendt points out, work creates a world for subjects in a way that it does not for animals. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
- 9.
Jean-Paul Sartre describes the experience of shame as that of being oneself in front of the other. The paradigmatic moment of shame is that of being caught spying through a keyhole. At this moment, the one who sees the subject illicitly looking exposes the excessive status of the subject’s enjoyment.
- 10.
The proper simile would be ‘strong as a dung beetle,’ given that this is likely the strongest animal on Earth relative to its size. Or, if one did not want to take size into account, the simile should be ‘strong as an elephant.’
- 11.
In contrast to pleasure, enjoyment requires the addition of some type of damage that the subject undergoes. There is no healthy enjoyment.
- 12.
Evolutionary psychologists do explain the contemporary obesity epidemic by pointing out the role that fat storage had in human survival. A large quantity of body fat had a necessary function for humans. But subjectivity enables us to exceed the bounds of this necessity. No human being needed to eat itself into immobility to survive.
- 13.
The anorexic’s enjoyment of not eating also follows from the law’s restriction of eating. This type of subject excessively attaches itself to the law’s restriction. By obeying the law excessively , the anorexic actually disobeys it.
- 14.
We do not know what mediation informs the relation to the world that animals have. As a result, the image of an immediate connection is only the product of the subject’s fantasy.
- 15.
The animal nicknames in the National Football League are: Atlanta Falcons, Arizona Cardinals, Baltimore Ravens, Carolina Panthers, Chicago Bears, Cincinnati Bengals, Denver Broncos, Detroit Lions, Indianapolis Colts, Jacksonville Jaguars, Los Angeles Rams, Miami Dolphins, Philadelphia Eagles, and Seattle Seahawks.
- 16.
According to Kant , our ability to enjoy the beauty of an object depends on its lack of utility; he claims: ‘Beauty is the form of the purposiveness of an object , insofar as it is perceived in it without representation of an end.’ Immanuel Kant , Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 120. This is equally the case with sublime objects , which is where we should locate the sporting event.
- 17.
This is the position of Charles Patterson in Eternal Treblinka. There, he states, ‘with animals already defined as “lower life” fated for exploitation and slaughter, the designation of “lesser” humans as animals paved the way for their subjugation and destruction.’ Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (New York: Lantern Books, 2002), p. 26.
- 18.
Giorgio Agamben , Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 114.
- 19.
William Shakespeare , Othello, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), I.i. pp. 97–98. Though there is considerable scholarly debate, it is at least likely that Othello and Desdemona never had time alone enough to have sex , at least after their marriage.
- 20.
Ibid., I.i. pp. 124–126.
- 21.
Ibid., I.ii. pp. 59–61.
- 22.
This is a widely shared view, articulated most famously by renowned Shakespeare interpreter A. C. Bradley. Comparing Othello with Shakespeare’s other heroes, Bradley writes, ‘if one places side by side with these speeches an equal number by any other hero, one will not doubt that Othello is the greatest poet of them all.’ A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1905), p. 188.
- 23.
Shakespeare (1996), I.i. pp. 125–126.
- 24.
Although other animals occasionally partake in face-to-face sex , it is only the bonobo that does so as a common practice.
- 25.
Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), p. 128.
- 26.
Jean-Paul Sartre , Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), p. 384. Sartre erroneously sees the dependence of the shamed subject on the other who sees it, when in fact it is the subject’s dependence on the law that is the source of shame . Sartre misses this because his philosophy does not locate freedom in the imposition of the law, as Kant does. For Sartre, the subject is free based on its capacity for self-negation, though he never seeks the source of this capacity.
Bibliography
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Aristotle. 1984. Politics. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, Vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes. Trans. B. Jowett. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Shakespeare, William. 1996. Othello. In The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
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McGowan, T. (2018). Like an Animal: A Simile Instead of a Subject. In: Basu Thakur, G., Dickstein, J. (eds) Lacan and the Nonhuman. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63817-1_9
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