The Time of Animal Voices

Authors

  • Ted Toadvine

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5399/uo/konturen.7.0.3532

Abstract

Phenomenology’s attention to the theme of animality has focused not on animal life in general but rather on the animal dimension of the human and its contested relation with humanity as such. Phenomenology thereby reproduces Agamben’s “anthropological machine” by which humanity is constructed through the “inclusive exclusion” of its animality. The alternative to this “inclusive exclusion” is not, however, a return to kinship or commonality, but rather an intensification of the constitutive paradox of our own inner animality, understood in terms of the anonymous, corporeal subject of perception that lives a different temporality than that of first-person consciousness. This provides us with an entirely different context for encounter with non-human others, insofar as they speak through our own voices and gaze out through our own eyes. This position is developed through a reading, first, of the proximity of Merleau-Ponty’s early work with that of Max Scheler, who paradigmatically reduces human animality to bare life. Merleau-Ponty differentiates himself from Scheler by emphasizing, in The Structure of Behavior, that life cannot be integrated into spirit without remainder. Merleau-Ponty’s later work thinks this remainder as the ineliminable gap and delay in the auto-affection of the body and as a chiasmic exchange that anticipates Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming animal.” This remainder of life within consciousness is the immemorial past of one’s own animality. It follows that our “inner animality” is neither singular nor plural but a kind of pack that speaks through the voice that I take to be mine. Furthermore, in the exchange of looks between myself and a non-human other, the crossing of glances occurs at an animal level that withdraws from my own reflective consciousness.

Author Biography

Ted Toadvine

Ted Toadvine is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. He is author of Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature (Northwestern, 2009) and editor or translator of eight books, including The Merleau-Ponty Reader(Northwestern, 2007) and Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself(SUNY, 2003). Toadvine directs the Series in Continental Thought at Ohio University Press, is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Environmental Philosophy, and is a co-editor of Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning Merleau-Ponty’s Thought. His current research interests include the immemorial past of nature, the phenomenology of human animality, and the disclosure of the end of the world through works of art.

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Published

2014-09-16

How to Cite

Toadvine, T. (2014). The Time of Animal Voices. Konturen, 6, 21–40. https://doi.org/10.5399/uo/konturen.7.0.3532