Abstract
Finite animal being is an imaginary lure that disguises the cut of signification that denaturalises the subject and renders it excessive. When we treat the subject as a natural being and regard it in terms of its evolutionary biology, we necessarily miss this excess. This imaginary conception of human animality increasingly befuddles us today. Instead of conceiving ourselves as human animals, we should grasp that human animality serves as a lure for how subjectivity actually functions. The image of the human animal enables us to disavow the excess of subjectivity that the subjection to the signifier produces and hides the trauma inherent in this excess.
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Notes
- 1.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 269; Kant’s emphasis.
- 2.
Kant’s assertion of the primacy of finitude contrasts with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who sees the subject’s infinitude as constitutive of its ability to recognize that it is finite. But this assertion earns Kant the approbation of Martin Heidegger, who finds in him a more proximate thinker than Hegel, precisely because Kant insists on a finitude of subjectivity that it cannot transcend. The moral law lifts the subject, for Kant, but it doesn’t allow the subject to escape its primary finitude.
- 3.
Kant contrasts obedience of the moral law , which is the source of freedom, with all other sorts of obedience. He indicates this difference with the terms ideal and idol. In the Metaphysics of Morals, he states, “Kneeling down or prostrating oneself on the ground, even to show your veneration for heavenly objects, is contrary to the dignity of humanity, as is invoking them in actual images; for you then humble yourself, not before an ideal presented to you by your own reason, but before an idol of your own making.” Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 559; Kant’s emphasis. Adherence to the moral ideal frees the subject from the lure of all idols, including those given by other members of one’s society, which otherwise govern the subject’s existence.
- 4.
This is, in effect, the critique of Kant that object oriented ontology puts forward. For those that take up this position, Kant’s insistence on the priority of the subject represents the major wrong turn in the history of modern Western philosophy. Once one takes this turn, one loses touch with the real object world and immerses oneself in the trap of representations.
- 5.
The priority that Kant gives to animal being testifies to an investment in the primacy of what Jacques Lacan calls the imaginary order. By understanding the relationship between the subject and the world in terms of the imaginary, one misses the distorting effect of the signifier’s mediation. As Lacan puts it in his Seminar IV, “The imaginary relation, which is an essentially alienated, interrupted, slowed, inhibited, and most often inverted relation, profoundly misrecognizes the relationship of speech between the subject and the Other, the big Other.” Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre IV: La relation d’object, 1956-1957, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 12. Taking the imaginary relation as a starting point for his theorizing forces Kant to miss the impossibility of the speaking subject simply acting like an animal.
- 6.
This recognition that our infinitude—our capacity to think beyond the finite givenness of our existence—is what enables our finitude to become a problem for us is an insight that appears in Hegel’s reworking of the Kantian philosophy.
- 7.
Although Freud distinguishes between Eros and death drive, Lacan insists that “every drive is virtually a death drive.” Jacques Lacan, “The Position of the Unconscious,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 719.
- 8.
The moral law is the basis for freedom because it opens up a space between what I’m inclined to do and what I do. As Alenka Zupančič points out in her panegyric to Kantian morality, “The defining feature of a free act … is precisely that it is entirely foreign to the subject’s inclinations.” Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (New York: Verso, 2000), 23. Without the uprooting encounter with the moral law , the subject remains just what it is and follows the inclinations given to it.
- 9.
See Joan Copjec, ed. Radical Evil (London: Verso, 1996).
- 10.
See Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), vol. 18, 1-64.
- 11.
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1961), vol. 19, 48.
- 12.
In contrast to Freud, Lacan does have a sense of the radicality of Kant’s insight in the discovery of the moral law . When he writes “Kant with Sade,” Lacan grasps that Kant performs the revolutionary step of turning morality away from the good, which is where it had been lodged since Aristotle. As Lacan sees it, even the pleasures that moral acts bring for the subject has the effect of disqualifying them as moral acts. Lacan states that rather than elevating these pleasures the reference to the good “renders these pleasures less respectable.” Jacques Lacan, “Kant with Sade,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 647.
- 13.
Jacques Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 579.
- 14.
Those who eat healthily and claim to enjoy this food seem to confound this analysis. But no one can simply eat healthily for biological reasons. By doing so, one enjoys a different form of self-destruction than the eater of doughnuts. The enjoyment of the health-food junkie derives from the sacrifice of the pleasure in eating tasty foods. With every spear of asparagus or crown of broccoli, one takes satisfaction from the ice cream and Twinkies that one is not eating. There is no path to a purely nutritive eating process.
- 15.
This is how Freud defines sexual perversion, though he insists at the same time that we cannot use it as a critique, precisely because it is nearly ubiquitous in human sexuality. He writes, “Perversions are sexual activities which either (a) extend, in an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body that are designed for sexual union, or (b) linger over the immediate relatons to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim.” Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Three of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), vol. 7, 149-50.
- 16.
Daniel Lieberman, The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Heath, and Disease (New York” Pantheon, 2013), 16.
- 17.
Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 473. Pinker claims that this adaptation for promiscuity is confined completely to men and that women have little genetic interest at all in multiple partners. But fellow evolutionary psychologist David M. Buss counters by pointing out the adaptive benefits of affairs for women. He states, “The economics of the mating market dictate that women can secure genes from an affair partner that are superior to those of her regular partner, at least in principle. A highly desirable man is often willing to have a brief encounter with a less desirable woman, as long as she does not burden him with entangling commitments. Indeed, if there were no costs, at optimal female mating strategy, in the ruthless currency of reproductive fitness, would be to secure reliable investments from her husband and superior genes from an affair partner.” David M. Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 235-36. The problem with each of these arguments lies in the fact that the only way that one can decide between them is on the basis of what one considers their political desirability. One might even say that these opposed arguments reveal the antinomies of evolutionary reason. For an unparalleled critique of the sexism informing evolutionary psychology, see Mari Ruti, The Age of Scientific Sexism: How Evolutionary Psychology Promotes Gender Profiling and Fans the Battle of the Sexes (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).
- 18.
Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
- 19.
See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
- 20.
Franz Kafka, “The Hunger Artist,” trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir, in The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum M. Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1971), 270.
- 21.
Kafka, “Hunger Artist,” 277.
Bibliography
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———. 1955a. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Trans. James Strachey. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 18, 1-64. London: Hogarth Press.
———. 1955b. The Ego and the Id, Trans. James Strachey. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 19, 1-66. London: Hogarth.
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———. 1996b. The Metaphysics of Morals. In Practical Philosophy, Trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lacan, Jacques. 1994. In Le Séminaire, livre IV: La relation d’object, 1956-1957, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil.
———. 2006. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton.
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McGowan, T. (2021). Self-Destruction and the Natural World. In: Burnham, C., Kingsbury, P. (eds) Lacan and the Environment. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67205-8_15
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