Conclusion: The Ethic of the Nonhuman

Abstract

At the end of this project, I am reminded of a saying I once heard: “Every problem has a simple answer … and it’s wrong.” The nonhuman is a problem and a paradox; moreover, it is a problem that does not seek to empty itself into a solution, a paradox that does not reveal any inadequacy in its propositions. As Deleuze says, “The force of paradoxes is that they are not contradictory; they rather allow us to be present at the genesis of the contradiction” (Logic 74). The nonhuman is not the undoing of the human. It is not, as idea, the beginning of an analysis that will fragment the human into elements. It is not what seeks out contradictions in the human’s image of itself. It is, above all, that which gives the human its possibility. What the human values of itself, what it puts out into the world, what it defines itself as being is set into motion by the force of the nonhuman. As we have seen, the human rarely addresses itself directly or overtly as a question in the novels we have read. Nevertheless, the human poses the question of its own meaning as it addresses those ideas and assumptions—about history, personality, morality—without which the human would have no meaning, no purchase with which to rise up in to being. And what appear as contradictions in the human’s imagining and conceiving of its world are the precipitates of other encounters, other movements.