On owning a dog

8/7/2019 On owning a dog

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On Owning a Dog

C.J. Sentell

September 2007

The problem, you see, is with my voice. The voice that appears as a system of signs on this

page, and the voice that will below reveal itself with a fair degree of regularity and according

to certain expectations. Where is this voice, and from whence does it come? How shall I

deploy this voice in the service of another, who, I might add, neither asked for this voice nor

cares that it speaks? The problem, then, concerns not the lack of a voice, a lack such as I

could attribute to the young canine lying at my feet, but with the positive phenomenon of

actually having a voice. Of fashioning a voice. Of deploying a voice in the service of

something. So this essay is about having a voice and using it.

A voice always indicates a body and, more specifically, a body in response. I am responding

to another body before me, in front of me, unfolding in time. This body is in motion. It is

moving and growing, breathing and eating, defecating and dying. In short, it is alive, and I

do not seem to stand in need of any further definition or clarification as to what this means.

But by responding, I become responsible. Or, rather, I reveal my ability to respond.

The question now becomes: what, if indeed anything, do I owe such a body, a body that has

been living with me now for four months, sharing my home and standing as a silent witness

to my days? What do I owe such a body and what, if anything, does it owe me? These, no

doubt, are questions traditionally assigned to ethics, questions that address the ethos or

character of a relation between two things, often limited to living things, and often limited

further to strictly human beings, and even to human beings in a polis. So this question

becomes peculiar when I mention that many would recognize this other as a dog, a furry

quadruped with canine-like sensibilities. Its peculiarity stems from a certain discrepancybetween the two poles of this relation, namely, that one of us has a voice and the other does

not. Or, put another way, one of us has a voice that speaks, while the other has a voice that

sounds, but whose sounds find it difficult to reach out from this page.


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From the question of owing or, to use a more loaded synonym, the question of obligation

we quickly reach the question of owning. It is a one letter difference really, which begs the

question as to what the difference is that actually makes a difference. What, in other words,

is at stake by asking this question of the difference between owing and owning? What does it

mean to ask this question, this question of whether and if so, how I can own a dog?

About the obligations and implications of canine ownership? What does this question imply

or entail or presuppose? What conceptions of the ethical must I accept, if only preliminarily,

to account for this phenomenon, a phenomenon which surely stands as one of the most

prevalent and if I may be allowed the term intimate categories of relation that we people

have with any other organisms, whether designated people or non-people?

But please forgive me. I forgot to introduce you. I must introduce you because this is a

meditation about him, on him, so to speak. It is in response to him. His name is Ozark, a

name, I should add, that I bestowed upon him. He is a black, standard poodle and, at the time

of this writing, is about five months old. Which is to say still a pup, a creature in a seemingly

unique position in that it seems to have more potentiality than actuality, less history and more

future than at other stages on lifes way. And this potential waits behind an actual body in

accelerated motion, a motion that, if I am not careful, will run away from me. (I actually lost

a day or two of his life reflecting on how I am responding to Ozark, so as to write these

words, and realized he had changed significantly in that time. He actually slipped away from

me while I was thinking about him, which is surely indicative of bad thinking.)

I must introduce you to Ozark because in this essay I would like to explore the ethical

boundaries between people and dogs, and I would like to do this primarily through the

concept of ownership. Ozark enters in because one of the arguments I would like to develop

here concerns the singular nature of ethical inquiry: that ethics is an inquiry into relations,

and that these relations never exist in the abstract and always occur within a particular matrix

of objects, times, and consequences. In order to facilitate the inquiry, and as a matter ofdoxa

and convenience (which are not at all insignificant reasons), I propose to circumscribe the

things of this discussion by flesh: Ozark is delimited by the flesh that encloses him, and I am

delimited by the flesh that encloses me. So this essay is not about people and dogs; it is

about a person and a dog. And while there are certainly other things within this matrix to

which we stand in relation, the primary relation in question is of that between me and Ozark.


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Thus, I would like to proceed by means of inquiring into this dog, this ownership, and this

owner.

This essay, moreover, can also be taken as an assay: a testing of certain ideas with respect to

the ongoing question of my ownership of Ozark. The ideas that I would like to put to test

here stem not only from any worries I might have about owning Ozark, but are also

motivated by an encounter Derrida has with his cat and a comment Merleau-Ponty makes

about a dog. Together, these encounters trace the contours of the ideas I would like to assay

in this essay. Let me briefly recount them.

In his essay The animal that therefore I am (more to follow), Derrida recalls an encounter

with his cat while he is in the bathroom. As Derrida stands naked before his cat, whose gaze

fixes upon him in the direction of his sex, he begins to feel a certain shame. Derrida is

ashamed at standing naked before his cat, but this is a reflected shame, the mirror of a

shame ashamed of itself, a shame that is at the same time specular, unjustifiable, and unable

to be admitted to.1 The shame that Derrida feels, in others words, is a shame of being

ashamed, standing naked before a creature who is always naked, but does not know it.

In a passage from The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty discusses how the gaze

of an other transforms him into an object, and how his gaze does the same to them. He says

I must choose between others and myself, it is said. But we choose one againstthe other,

and thus assert both. The other person transforms me into an object and denies me, I

transform him into an object and deny him, it is asserted. In fact the others gaze transforms

me into an object, and mine him, only if both make ourselves into an inhuman gaze, if each

of us feels his actions to be not taken up and understood, but observed as if they were an

insects. That is what happens, for instance, when I fall under the gaze of the stranger. But

even then, the objectification of each by the others gaze is felt as unbearable only because it

takes the place of possible communication. A dogs gaze directed towards me causes me no

embarrassment. The refusal to communicate, however, is still a form of communication.2

So while, unlike Derrida, Merleau-Ponty does not feel embarrassed under the gaze of a dog,

he does consider their lack of communication to be a form of communication.

1 Derrida, The animal that therefore I am (more to follow), inAnimal Philosophy , pg. 1142 Merleau-Ponty, from The Phenomenology of Perception inBasic Writings , pg.160


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Shame, embarrassment, and ownership. The gaze, communication, and response. A dog, a

concept, and an owner. Let these stand as guideposts for this inquiry.

* * *

In hisPolitics, Aristotle says that only beasts and gods live outside the polis, the polis being

the proper place for the flourishing of the human animal alone. The important upshot of this

characterization for the life of non-human animals is that they cannot properly partake of

human political and ethical life. Animals, being and living outside the polis, are excluded

from the realm of the ethical because ethos can only be cultivated of the human animal within

thepolis. Moreover, the ethical for Aristotle is not by nature, which is not to say contrary to

nature (which would be the impossible), but simply to say by convention. Ethics, for

Aristotle, is a type of physics of the soul, and the specifically human soul can be developed

only within the polis, which is its proper place and home.

Now, obviously, this existence outside the polis need not be taken in strictly spatial terms.

There are many animals that live with human beings inside the polis. Not only are there what

Donna Haraway terms companion species, species that have come to occupy a central

place in our lives and cultures, animals we typically define as pets, e.g. dogs and cats, certain

birds, etc.3

But there are also a whole host of other critters that live with and around us.

Rats, songbirds, squirrels, raccoons, deer, opossums, fish, frogs, turtles, and skunks are all

actively carving out space for themselves within the polis, spatially speaking, and, if you live

in places such as the American West, animals such as bears, cougars, wolves, and elk silently

stalk the edges too.

The co-existence, and sometimes collision, of humans and animals works to reinforce the

idea that animals do not live outside the polis in the strictly spatial sense. Haraway calls

these overlappings naturecultures, a term that attempts to capture the way in which biology

and sociality are intimately and inextricably linked.4 These naturecultures are the places

where cultural lives brush up against what are typically taken to be natural lives.

Naturecultures are all around us, and when it comes to the companion species of dogs and

3 Cf. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto4Ibid., pg. 12


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cats, certainly they live within the polis within our homes and sometimes even in our beds!

in a unique way that calls for a unique way of thinking.

So to speak of animals as living outside the polis is to speak of them not as not living with

humans inside the polis, but rather is to speak of them as being excluded from a certain form

of human life, namely, the ethical and political. But this conceptual demarcation eventually

runs into trouble. While the dogs and cats of our lives do not hold seats at the city council,

their roles within our ethical lives, or our lives within the polis, are nonetheless real and

consequential. Not only is our culture intimately involved in the lives of animals due to the

simple fact that some humans often eat them, there are also animals that play active roles in

the culture of labor, and animals that pose social questions due to the special care they

require for their continued existence. Many people, for example, consider the habit of

slaughtering and eating the flesh of animals to be a deeply ethical issue, and the rise of

industrial agriculture and factory farming only reinforces this intuition in significant ways.

The reintroduction of the wolf in several Western states, and the political struggles for and

against them from environmentalists and ranchers, is another example. Closer to home, the

explosion of the white-tailed deer population, with its dangers to motorists and their general

nuisance factor is another. From whales to field mice, the struggles for protection and

preservation certainly are live ethical questions for us human animals living in a polis.

All this is to say that animals, while they may live outside of the polis in the sense that they

do not directly partake in political life, are nevertheless active subjects of political and ethical

life. So while Aristotles exclusion of beasts from the polis may do away with the possibility

of us forming an ethics foranimals, on their behalf so to speak, it does not obviate the

question of our ethical comportment toward animals. To put it another way, while the

attempt to outline the ways in which specific animal behaviors, in themselves, could be right

or wrong or ethical or unethical is certainly a fruitless, and perhaps even dangerous task (a

task which would stand to be one of the worst forms of anthropomorphism), we are

nevertheless left with the question of how we humans can formulate ethical habits toward the

animals with which we live.

As I have presented the problematic thus far, however, I have taken for granted the

distinction between animals and humans. As we typically understand it, animals and humans


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are taken to be two clear and distinct categories of living beings. There is Human, on the one

hand, and, on the other, the Animal. In his essay The animal that therefore I am (more to

follow), however, Derrida works to complicate this neat bifurcation. Derrida argues that

from the beginning of our philosophical, theological, and ethical tradition the Animal has

been rigorously and consistently placed over and against the Human, and that in fact the

Human is only Human in contradistinction to Animal.

Several conceptual distinctions have been deployed to justify both the conception of this

difference, as well as its practical consequences. The most common of these is by means of a

capacity (or lack of capacity) for language. Derrida points out that from Aristotle to Lacan,

including Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, and Levinas, all of them claim that the essential

feature of animality is that it is without language.5

A certain lack, in other words, defines

them out of membership of the human category. In this argument, the Human becomes

Human through the unique ability to communicate in speech. This distinction is often traced

back to Aristotles characterization of the human being as azon logon echon, or the animal

that uses speech. Philosophers that affirm and use this distinction almost always emphasize

the logon echon aspect over the zon aspect, and have tended, moreover, to characterize the

animals lack of language, or lack oflogos, as a lack of freedom and the lack of the ability to

respond. Descartes, for example, thinks of animality in terms of animal-machines, or as

organisms that react merely deterministically to stimuli in their environment. This input-

output model of the animal has been a dominant trope of philosophical thinking on animals

since Descartes.

Derrida, in his essay And say the animal responded?, takes up the question of reaction and

response in terms of a more recent example of this trope in the work of Lacan. Lacan,

according to Derrida, holds that the animal is capable only of a coded message or of a

meaning that is narrowly indicative, strictly constrained; one that is fixed in its

programmation.6 By limiting the animal only to a capacity for reaction, rather than

response, Lacan is able to once again affirm the line between humans and animals as a

rigorous and firm line of demarcation. This demarcation, moreover, always precedes through

the denial of a power, namely, the power of language and the power of response. By denying

5 Derrida, And say the animal responded?, inZoontologies, pg. 1256 Derrida, And say the animal responded, pg. 122


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the animal the ability to respond, Lacan also denies the animal the power of subterfuge, or

willful deceiving; the animal, for Lacan, is incapable of covering its own tracks.7

Of Lacan,

Derrida writes: It is by means of the power to pretend a pretense that one accedes to Speech,

to the order of Truth, to the symbolic order in short, to the order of the human.8

So Lacan

is following in a long tradition of trying to think through a firm line of difference between the

animal and the human, and finds the lack of the ability to pretend and respond to be what

denies the animal access to the order of the human.

But Derrida traces Lacans attempt at such a demarcation only to deny the rigor of the line.

Derrida says that his hesitation concerns only the purity, the rigor, and the indivisibility of

the frontier that separates already with respect to us humans reaction from response; and

as a consequence, especially, the purity, rigor, and indivisibility of the concept of

responsibility that ensues.9

It is here that the upshot of a characterization such as Lacans

becomes clear, namely, that if the ability to respond is denied to the animal, then

responsibility does not follow. To merely react is not to be in the realm of responsibility (and

therefore ethics) precisely because there is no choice in the matter; determinism obviates

responsibility. To respond is to be able to be held responsible; responsibility is, literally, the

ability to respond.

At this point it would be tempting to attempt to rethink whether Ozark can respond, and

therefore whether he could or should be included in the realm of the responsibility. But this

is precisely what Derrida is cautioning against. By complicating the line between reaction

and response, Derrida wants to complicate the line that demarcates responsibility from other

ethical concepts. We should not ask such questions as whether the dog responds or merely

reacts precisely because reaction and response are two conceptual poles in which activity is

always already oscillating in between. No action is every purely a reaction, just as no

response is every purely a response. And as Derrida says, it is less a matter of asking

whether one has the right to refuse the animal such and such a powerthan of asking

whether what calls itself human has the right to rigorously attribute to man, which means

therefore to attribute to himself, what he refuses the animal, and whether he can ever possess

7Ibid., pg. 137

8Ibid., pg1339Ibid., pg127


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the pure, rigorous, indivisible concept, as such, of that attribution.10 So not only must I

refrain from asking this question of the dog, but I must deny any rigid homogeneous

categorization of the response to humans as well. (This, in all honesty, seems fair enough

and actually empirically justifiable. Humans hardly respond, in the full sense of the world,

all the time.)

To say that the human is an animal capable of response, and that the dog is only capable of

reaction, then, is to describe the two in ways that are grossly over generalized. Reaction and

response occur along a range of possibilities whose instantiations vary according to specific

situations. Derrida does not want to erase the difference between reaction and response, but

to take that difference into account within the whole differentiated field of experience and of

a world of life-forms. And that means refraining from reducing this differentiated and

multiple difference, in a similarly massive and homogenizing manner, to one between the

human subject, on the one hand, and the nonsubject that is the animal in general, on the other,

by means of which the latter comes to be, in another sense, the nonsubject that is subjected to

the human subject.11 And so by denying the purity and rigor of the line between reaction

and response, Derrida believes we can also begin to undermine the consequent line between

the animal and the human. In fact, Derrida maintains that casting doubt on responsibility,

on decision, on ones own being-ethical, seems to me to be and is perhaps what should

forever remain the unrescindable essence of ethics: decision and responsibility. Every firm

knowledge, certainty, and assurance on this subject would suffice, precisely, to confirm the

very thing one wishes to disavow, namely, the reactionality in the response.12

By denying

the reaction present in every response, and the response present in every reaction, we gloss

over the difference that is necessarily a part of both.

In this sense, according to Derrida one of the fundamental errors we make in thinking about

the difference between animals and humans is taking this line for granted, taking it as a

distinct and determinate line that operates without question. But there is a tension here.

While Derrida encourages us to take the line between human and animal as fluid and

indeterminate, he also wants to deny any radical continuity between the two. In fact, Derrida

10

Ibid., pg. 13711Ibid.,pg. 12812Ibid.


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claims there is an infinite abyss between him and his cat. So while it is not possible to draw a

rigorous, pure line between animals and humans, neither do they participate is some one

grand biological continuum.13 Derrida is concerned, above all, to respect and maintain

difference in the face of non-categorical difference, or of difference within that which cannot

be rigorously demarcated.

In order to encourage us to think through and beyond these concepts, Derrida introduces the

neologism lanimot, which is a combination of the French words lanimaland its plural

animaux, with the word for word, mot. In doing so, Derrida would like us to see that the

power to name, to give word to object, and thereby ostensibly define the parameters of a

concept, is a linguistic power, and that in this case it does not pick out some ontological

category of strictly non-human beings. In this word, moreover, Derrida wants to have the

plural of animals heard in the singular.14

In other words, one of the primary mistakes we

make is speaking of animality as something homogenous and definite, while contrasting it to

humanity, which is taken to be equally singular and identifiable. He goes on to say that

there is no animal in the general singular, separated from man by a single indivisible limit.

We have to envisage the existence of living creatures whose plurality cannot be assembled

within the single figure of an animality that is simply opposed to humanity.[I]t is rather a

matter of taking into account a multiplicity of heterogeneous structures and limits15

So the

line between humanity and animality, for Derrida, is a mixed line, indeterminate and fluid.

There is no such thing as the Animal, or even animals in the general plural. There are only

entities in varying shapes and sizes living and dying through time. On the one hand, there are

these entities and, on the other, lanimot, which are each irreducible to the other. The focus

must be radically singular, in solidarity with the singular organism, which destabilizes the

concepts or words we use to designate them (and which are always general) in the process.

Derrida traces out a conceptual lineage different from the one that explicitly characterizes the

human as that which has a special capacity for language. By examining the creation myths of

Prometheus and Epimetheus, as well as the Biblical narrative of Genesis, Derrida aims to

show that there is an equally pernicious story of demarcation that focuses a certain lack,

13

Derrida, The animal that therefore I am (more to follow), class print off from Critical Inquiry, pg. 1714Ibid., inAnimal Philosophy , pg. 12515Ibid.


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rather than a special capacity, by which humans are distinguished from animals. These are

the myths of the Fall of Man and narrate a certain lack that, paradoxically, turns out to give

humans absolute dominion over the animals (and the world in general). Derrida writes: it is

paradoxically on the basis of a fault or failing in man that the latter will be made a subject

who is master of nature and of the animal. From within the pit of that lack, an eminent lack,

a quite different lack from that he assigns to the animal, man installs or claims in a single

movement what is proper to him (the peculiarity of a man whose property it is not to have

anything that is exclusively is) and his superiority over what is called animal life.16 This

dominion, especially in the Biblical narrative, has everything to do with the power to name

and categorize the world in the service of human needs. He says that, as with Descartes, and

according to the tried and true biblical and Promethean tradition that I keep coming back to,

it relates the fixity of animal determinism within the context of information and

communication to a type of originary perfection of that animal. Conversely, if human

knowledge has greater autonomy than animal knowledge in relation to the field of force of

desire and if the human order is distinguished from nature, it is paradoxically because of an

imperfection, because of an originary fault in man, who has, in short, received speech and

technics only inasmuch as he lacks something.17 Thus the shame Derrida feels when he

stands naked before his cat is a shame based within a genealogy of good and evil that runs

back to a myth of the originary fallenness of humankind, and that is what makes him

ashamed at his shame.

But both of these stories, along with the more philosophical discourses mentioned earlier, are

in the service of justifying a particular arrangement of powers and practices. They attempt to

explain the difference between human and animals in terms of a lack on the part of the

human or a lack on the part of the animal. In his discussion of Lacan, Derrida says: The

animal does not know evil, lying, deceit. What it lacks is precisely the lack by virtue of

which the human becomes subject of the signifier. But to be subject of the signifier is also to

be a subjecting subject, a subject as master, an active and deciding subject of the signifier,

having in any case sufficient mastery to be capable of pretending to pretend and hence of

being able to put into effect ones power to destroy the trace. This mastery is the superiority

16 Derrida, The animal that therefore I am (more to follow), class print off from Critical Inquiry, pg. 1117 Derrida, And say the animal responded?, pg. 124


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of man over the animot18 Following this, I want suggest that the perceived right to

ownership in terms of a dog stems from this mastery, this dominance we take to be a right of

ours as being subjecting subjects, and that this is very much a part of the same story which

gives rise to the shame and embarrassment that is or is not at work in Derridas and Merleau-

Pontys encounter with the cat and dog, respectively.

Dogs, according to this story, are objects in the fullest sense of the word; they are

commodities in the flow of capital. Dogs are bought and sold in the marketplace, exchanged

for currency, and treated as any other object we obtain under the auspices of need and desire.

A dog is a thing that we lord over, have dominion over, and dominate and control through

ownership. Though the co-evolution of humans and dogs is long and complex, involving

changing patterns of strategy and use on each side of the evolutionary coin, dogs no longer

function primarily as partners in labor and life. Rather, they have become anthropomorphic

members of the bourgeois family and fashionable things with which we accessorize our

person. In this way, the question of how we relate to these creatures is mediated and

prefigured by an entire network of commodity relations.

Moreover, dogs are things we possess by means of a right we bestow upon ourselves, a right

based largely in might because we are literally able to control the physical, corporeal body of

the dog in an overwhelming number of instances. This might is indeed a species of violence,

and this violence reaches only its poetic apogee in the act of naming. Ownership, in this way,

is violent. And when our canine companions break free of this control whether this is

simply running free from us at the park, or whether they themselves do something (we

perceive as) violent, such as attack someone they transgress a certain boundary that can

deeply disturb us. But sometimes the dog bites back, thereby challenging the very status of

their being owned.

If the dog is a piece of property in the flow of capital, then the ownership of this property

involves the full assertion of our assumed unity as subjects constituted by a matrix of

perceived rights. As Terry Eagleton remarks, albeit in a different context, property is the

18Ibid., pg. 132


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sign and seal of subjectivity.19 So the sign and seal of me being a subject is that I own, that I

have property and exercise authority and dominion over it. The owned object reifies the

owning subject; it makes us real, tangible, and identifiable to ourselves and others. And the

fact, in the case of the dog, that this object is living does not seem to be as problematic such

as would be the case if the object were another human. After all, so the story goes, humans

can respond, while the animal can only react. These pieces of property, moreover, do not

simply reify the subject in terms of its subjectivity, but also become its subjectivity. In the

flow of capital, I am me primarily as an owner of things. The objects of ownership do not

simply intertwine with my identity, but actually constitute it. The right we grant ourselves to

own property, then, is a right to reification; it makes concrete both our identity and the

identity of the thing owned. And while we resist the notion that every thing is able to be a

piece of property, every piece of property is already constituted as a thing. In this respect,

owning a dog is not very different from owning a pair of shoes or a car: by staking a claim of

ownership over it, we establish it as a thing to control and dispose of at our leisure. In this

strong sense of ownership, in which ones identity is deeply bound up with the identity of the

object owned, owning entails a certain sort of relationship, namely, one of responding to it,

of taking care with respect to it.

If the ownership constitutes you as a subject and the object as an object, then ownership

involves a type of commitment to the ongoing existence of the relation. If and when the

relation breaks down, then both the subject and the object of that relation too break down.

Thus, ownership, if it is to continue, commits the owner to caring for something in a

particular way, to attend to its existence; it means to be committed to certain actions

according to the proper use of the object owned. In this way, there are two orders of

normative stipulation involved with owning a dog. In the first order, there is the right to

ownership in general, which is a right based on the perceived legitimacy of ourselves as

viable subjects with dominion over the world. The second-order normative stipulation

involves the proper way in which objects are owned; there are indeed proper and improper

ways to own things, and at least part of the propriety of owning a dog involves providing it

with food and water and shelter, and generally seeing to its continued existence.

19 Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, pg. 84


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But the whole way I have formulated this is deeply dissatisfying and problematic. In fact, the

whole discussion heretofore has been rather asinine. It has remained mired in the generalities

of subject and object, and in the language of the animal and human. Derrida says this much,

though he does not offer any clear ways around these problem, when he says: Whenever

one says, the animal, each time a philosopher, or anyone else says, the animal in the

singular and without further ado, claiming thus to designate every living thing that is held not

to be man (man as a rational animal, man as a political animal, zon logon echon, man who

says I and takes himself to be the subject of a statement that he proffers on the subject of

the said animal, and so on), each time this subject of that statement, this one, this I does

that he utters an asinanity [betise]. He avows without avowing it, he declares, just as a

disease is declared by means of a symptom, he offers up for diagnosis the statement I am

uttering an asinanity. And this I am uttering an asinanity should confirm not only the

animality that he is disavowing but his complicit, continued and organized involvement in a

veritable war of the species.20

That said, please allow me to begin again, from where I am.

* * *

Ethics concerns relations. And the necessary syntactical consequence in making this claim is

that an ethics involves more than one entity. A relation exists between two things; ethics in a

solipsistic world would be a concept without content, if indeed it could be a concept at all.

(Or, alternatively, if we can speak of being ethical with ourselves, it is only through a

reflexive distantiation of a certain part of our identity to a certain realm of possible action.)

Ethics, in short, is about relating, about relationships that obtain between at least putatively

different things. Within the concept of relation fall a number of related concepts such as

action, decision, responsibility, etc. In this way, it is more accurate to speak ofbeingethical

rather than to speak of ethics as a static body of knowledge.

Ethics or ethical thinking, then, is an inquiry in motion which concerns relating to another;

being ethical is thinking in process with others, or thinking with others in process. So if we

understand ethics to be this continual readjustment of ones comportment to others, or of the

ongoing decision of how to act in specific instances, then the question becomes how these

decisions are made and how this readjustment occurs.

20 Derrida, The animal that therefore I am (more to follow), class print off from Critical Inquiry, pg. 17


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Within the philosophical tradition, ethics typically has been about the specifically human

relations that obtain between people. In formulating ethical habits of action, the crux of the

matter has been how to articulate this formulation. Articulation and formulation. Speech and

logos. In Greek, logos means (among other things) formulation and speech, or, to combine

them, the formulation of speech. Being ethical is articulating this formula for action, with the

articulation always being understood as a temporary one aimed at a specific, pressing scene

of action. In this way, communicating to the other with whom you are in relation, with

whom you reside in the scene of pressing action, is the sine qua non of being ethical. To be

ethical in a relationship with another human being is to communicate about how that

relationship is to proceed, to coordinate and situate the types of actions that are conducive to

the continuation of the relation. Coordinating through communication is the condition of

possibility of being ethical with other human beings.

Thus, many of the traditional ways in which philosophers have tried to write about ethics are

flawed in two ways. First, they attempt to outline the contours of human life in such a way

that their ethics can become a fixed structure of social life. What we need to do, so the story

goes, is identify the features of ethical life, outline the ways in which they are related, and

analyze the implications with respect to individuals. Ethics, in this way, can be completed if

we get these features right and analyze them in the correct way. Once the ethical

architectonic is established, all that is left for individuals to do is to follow the prescriptions

outlined by philosophy: establish the rules and live within them. The second flawed

approach to ethics is this focus on the individual. Being ethical, in much of the philosophical

tradition, is concerned with an autonomous, individual subject who has choice in the matters

that matter, and that that choosing correctly amounts to being ethical. The individual, in this

ethical story, is the smallest unit of analysis; only the individual can be ethical, and thus it is

to this individual which ethics addresses itself.

But these two approaches are deeply flawed. Again, ethics is never complete, nor is it solely

about individuals. Being ethical is a process co-extensive with our being in a polis, and such

being is always being with others. In this sense, the smallest unit of analysis is not the

individual, but the relation. The relation is what matters, and this relation is not a fixed

relation, it is not hypostatized forever, come what may. Rather, as constituent parts of

relations, we are called to always resituate ourselves within the given field of relations.


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Relations shift and change precisely because the objects shift and change, and are doing so at

every moment. This makes ones ethical comportment a question of responding to the

myriad relations regardless and actually in spite of scopes large and small of which we

always already find ourselves in the midst. Ethics, in this sense, is never complete; our being

ethical is predicated not on the condition of our asking about our own subjectivity, but by

constantly asking the question of relation through time. This way of formulating the matter

might immediately become problematic when I turn to my ethical eye to animals simply

because, at least as things stand, Ozark has yet to communicate to me through recognizable

speech. Thus the questioning of the relation that is being ethical would seem to become

difficult when one-half of that relation appears to be unable to ask to the question, when half

of the relation seems to be dialogically absent from the relation. I cannot inquire as to how

Ozark is feeling and have him respond in a syntactically equivalent sentence, or at least he

has not done so yet.

And if being ethical is the questioning and articulating of the relations in which we find

ourselves always already enmeshed, there is thus the problem of formulating an ethical

comportment in a one-sided conversation. Along these lines, Derrida asks: Would an ethics

be sufficient, as Levinas maintains, to remind the subject of being-subject, its being-guest,

host or hostage, that is to say its being-subjected-to-the-other, to the Wholly Other or to every

single other?...I dont think so. It takes more than that to break with the Cartesian tradition of

the animal machine that exists without language and without the ability to respond.21

So

what more is needed in a conception of what it means to be ethical than a simple formulation

of communicative ethics, of an ethics that reminds the subject of its subjectivity and therefore

requires it to engage linguistically with other subjects?

I think two notions are helpful in this regard. These notions will overcome this stumbling

block of language and communication, on the one hand, and reaction and response, on the

other, which are preventing me from thinking the possibility of a reciprocal ethical

relationship with Ozark.

21 Derrida, And say the animal responded, pg. 121


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The first is an idea Merleau-Ponty provides in his notes for the third lecture in Nature where

he puts forward the notion that the logos is inscribed in the flesh of the world. The sign, in

other words, is part and parcel of the flesh, it emerges out of the flesh and memory of the

world that is nature. He says that the human body is symbolism not in the superficial

sense, i.e., where a representative term takes the place of another, - but in the fundamental

sense: expressive of another. And the meanings in between them. For the unity of the

body.22 Merleau-Ponty is talking not just about the human body here, though, but about all

bodies in general. His notes continue: Expressive = by their insertion in a nonconventional

system of equivalences, in the cohesion of a body. An eye that inspects a landscape =

interrogation and response.23 I read this to mean that language, as we conceive it as a fully-

formed system of articulation, is grounded within the immanence of flesh in the world. The

body and language are of the same material, and that language is an extension of perception:

There is a Logos of the natural esthetic world, on which the Logos of language relies24

or,

Communication in the visible is continued by a communication in the backside inverse of

our gestures and our words. Language as a resumption of the logos of the sensible world in

an other architectonic. And all historicity as well. Matrices of history.25 Donna Haraway

follows the general contours of this idea when she says that there cannot be just one

companion species; there have to be at least two to make one. It is in the syntax; it is in the

flesh. Dogs are about the inescapable, contradictory story of relationships co-constitutive

relationships in which none of the partners pre-exist the relating, and the relating is never

done once and for all. Historical specificity and contingent mutability rule all the way down,

into nature and culture, into naturecultures.26

With this set of ideas, I think we can get a little further in thinking this possible relation. So

to include him in a relation with myself that is guided by an ethical concern for the

continuation of the relation, I do not need to ask whether he responds or reacts. Rather, I can

ground the meaning that occurs between us and there is no doubt meaning being

transmitted throughout our interactions in the logos of the sensible world. The meaning is

unified by our bodies in mutual perception. In this way, there is meaning communicated

22

Merleau-Ponty,Nature Lectures, pg. 21923

Ibid.24

Ibid., pg. 21225Ibid., pg. 21926 Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, pg. 12


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outside of spoken and written language. He regards me and I regard him, and in our regard

for one another, the inquiry into the relation can and does proceed. Thus, the canine-human

relation is reciprocally constituting, mutually beneficial, and symbiotic. Lives are joined in a

positive dependency permeated with meaning. But, of course, this joinedness, this joint

effort at life, varies in degree by as many particular relations as are there between dogs and

people.

The second notion I would like to solicit aid from comes from Kelly Oliver in an essay on

animal pedagogy. There, she suggests that language, along with other characteristics unique

to man including spirit, reason, understanding, recollecting, recognizing, free will and even

fire, are responses to animals whom men ape or imitate[M]en learn to become man only by

virtue of animal pedagogy.27

Human behavior, in this sense, can be seen as a response to

and in imitation of other animals. Indeed, and in a spirit following the previous point of

Merleau-Ponty, she says that human language is a response to animal speech; homologos is

a response to zologos28 Both human and animal, then, are participating in the logos that

joins them in a common meaning, which, in turn, creates the possibility for human and

animal to communicate without translation across some pure, incommensurable boundary.

More generally, Oliver is attempting to open up a horizon wherein humans can learn from

animals by way of animal pedagogy. Such an attempt may help us move beyond the

questions of simple ethical comportment between people and animal by showing us the ways

in which the two poles of a relation, and especially the pole we term non-human, can share,

affect, and teach one another through meaningful interaction.

With these two ideas in mind, I would like to conclude this inquiry into dog ownership,

which, really, does not and cannot have a conclusion. If anything, the underlying point of

this discussion is that I cannot write the ethics of owning a dog; such a thing must be an

ongoing inquiry into this relation that I am in with a dog named Ozark. Only through a voice

that has moved outside of the logos of the flesh could I articulate such a faade of meaning

and argument. And because this faade does not concern Ozark in the least, because it does

not affect his interactions with me, it thereby falls outside of the scope of our ethical inquiry.

Such an inquiry, as I have tried to show, must be grounded in the particular experience of one

27 Oliver, Animal Pedagogy, pg.10828Ibid.


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dog and one person, two organisms joined together, clinging to one another against the

inexorable march of time, working to sustain a relation which is found by both members to

be mutually beneficial. This relation has to be re-constituted at every moment, with regard to

each in our corporeal and temporal specificity.

In short, I would like to suggest that I do not own Ozark, at least in any deep or meaningful

sense. He is a body with his own principle of motion, and one of my jobs within our

relationship is simply to aid him in continuing that motion for as long as possible. This, for

sure, involves feeding him and protecting him from certain obvious dangers. It also involves

me helping him to learn how best to get on in a world populated with lots of non-canine

companions. But at a certain point, and to a certain extent, he is on his own. Or, he is his

own. And while I often attempt to communicate to him through language (with a fair degree

of success, I might add), many of his needs and desires are communicated to me by other

means. His animal pedagogy, in short, takes work on both of our parts, but I am a willing

partner who is eager to learn through his example.

Ethics is about experience, not words. This is how we can have ethical relationships outside

of language, with various animals, environments, etc. Because ethics is experiential and not

linguistic or strictly conceptual, we are able to form ethical relationships in a variety of ways

and at multiple levels. And convincing those who are able to read this voice of mine of this

seems itself to be a pressing ethical task.

For now, there is a dog to feed.


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Bibliography

*Derrida, Jacques. (2002). The animal that therefore I am (more to follow). Critical

Inquiry, Winter 2002, vol. 28(2), pg. 369. Printed as pages 1-32.

*----------. (2002). The animal that therefore I am (more to follow) inAnimal Philosophy:

Ethics and Identity. Edited by Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco. London:

Continuum Press.

----------. (2003) And say the animal responded? inZoontologies: The Question of theAnimal. Edited by Cary Wolf. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Eagleton, Terry. (1990). The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Haraway, Donna. (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant

Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945). Selections from The Phenomenology of Perception in

Basic Writings. Edited by Thomas Baldwin. London: Routledge Press.

----------. (1956-1960). Nature: Course Notes from the Collge de France. Complied with

notes by Dominique Sglard and translated by Robert Vallier. Evanston:

Northwester University Press. English translation 2003.

Oliver, Kelly. (2006). Animal Pedagogy: The Origin of Man in Rousseau and Herder.

Culture, Theory, & Critique, vol. 47(2), pgs. 107-131.

* I listed both versions of this essay because they are not entirely the same texts. References

to this text within my essay are specified.

On owning a dog

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