UPI2208: Imagining Animals
Introduction
How have artists, philosophers,and writers of fiction imagined the relation between humans and animals? Have they imagined humans as a species of animal, or as belonging to a realm of being that exceeds the lives of animals? What, if anything, distinguishes us from animals: language, clothing, reason, or something else? In this course we will examine some of the ways these questions have been explored in visual art, philosophy, and literary texts. Students will consider how we look at animals, read the views of influential philosophers, and immerse themselves in fiction that imagine animals. The course will conclude with an examination of a provocative text by the novelist J. M. Coetzee, who stages a confrontation between philosophy and literature on the question of imagining animals.
Organization of the Module
The module will begin by considering how we imagine animals in everyday images such as cartoons or photographs, as well as paintings. One of the points of this focus will to emphasize how ubiquitous animal imagery is. At the same time, we will reflect on how animals are represented in these images, as well as what this suggests--depending on the genre--about the relation between the animals represented and the viewer. We will identify patterns that appear in these representations--animals imagined as wild, as tame, as companion pets, dead animals--and consider what such patterns might suggest about how we imagine our relationship with animals.
We then move, in the second unit, to a survey of especially influential views of animals by such prominent philosophers as Montaigne, Descartes, and Bentham. This unit will try to illustrate the tension that inheres, at least in the occidental philosophical tradition, between on the one hand those who regard animals as subject to humans (and assume an absolute division between them on the basis of such notions as language or the faculty of reason), and on the other hand those who question such assumptions. The unit culminates in Derrida's poetico-philosophical approach to animals as wholly other and the question of responsibility towards them.
Finally, in the third unit, and taking our cue from Derrida, we will consider how animals have been imagined in literature by such canonical figures as Swift, Kafka, and Coetzee. The work of the latter relates closely to that of Derrida in a number of respects, for instance in the way it subverts generic expectations: it seems to refuse engaging philosophically with the question as to our relation to, and our responsibility towards, animals. At the bottom of this refusal lies Coetzee's, or his protagonist Elizabeth Costello's, view that philosophy is deeply implicated in a violence against animals that is justified on the basis of a valorization of reason, and on the assumption that animals do not possess reason. Coetzee's text suggests that literature offers an avenue of sympathetic identification with, or imagining of, animals. To illustrate this his text reads a number of literary texts, some of which we will have read (e.g. Swift and Kafka), as well as some of the philosophers we will have discussed (e.g. Montaigne, Descartes, Nagel). Even though the text is presented as a fiction that seeks to reject a philosophical approach to animals, it nonetheless itself draws on the discourse of reason, and thereby inserts itself into the occidental philosophical tradition, at least as Coetzee seems to understand it. This paradox then returns us to the larger question with which the module is concerned, namely how we are to imagine animals and our relationship to them.
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