Abstract
This paper refocuses the “question of the animal” through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis. It asks whether we can speak of desire in the animal, how such desire is constituted in relation to the human, and what ethical questions it poses for the human subject. Lacan’s intervention in philosophical thought shows the potential of the discourse of the analyst to rearticulate the kinship-relationship of human and other-than-human animal worlds. Key aspects of Lacan’s intervention revolve around speech and the body in relation to being and enjoyment; the animal-subject’s relationship to the Other and the place of the body in enjoyment/pain; the possibility of the imaginary in the animal; the relation of animality to the Real and the topological movement between Innenwelt and Umwelt that concerns both animals and humans.
Speech is essentially the means of gaining recognition.… That is why, in a sense, one can speak of the language of animals. Animals have a language [langage] to the degree that there is someone there to understand it.
—Lacan, Seminar Book I, Freud’s Papers on Technique
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Notes
- 1.
See Robert S. Emmett and David E. Nye, eds., The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017); Hannes Bergthaller and Peter Mortensen, eds., Framing the Environmental Humanities (Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2018); and Sverker Sörlin, “Environmental Humanities: Why Should Biologists Interested in the Environment Take the Humanities Seriously?” BioScience 62, no. 9 (September 2012): 788-89, 10.1525/bio.2012.62.9.2; as well as the journals Environmental Humanities and Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities. Ecocritical thought and the greening of cultural studies, with the work of scholars such as Lawrence Buell, Rob Nixon, and Ursula K. Heise, were central to the development of the Environmental Humanities.
- 2.
Peter Buse, ‘The Dog and the Parakeet: Lacan among the Animals,’ Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 22, no. 4 (2017): 133-45, 10.1080/0969725X.2017.1406052.
- 3.
Although in his last seminars Lacan adopts a position of psychoanalysis as anti-philosophy, such position should be understood as a continuing interrogation and dialogue with philosophy.
- 4.
Jacques Lacan, The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst: Seven Talks at Sainte-Anne, 1971-1972, trans. Cormac Gallagher, http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Book-19a-The-Knowledge-of-the-Psychoanalyst-1971-1972.pdf (accessed May 30, 2020). Gallagher’s translation is from unedited French manuscripts. Lacan gave these talks in the same period that he was holding Seminar XIX: … Ou pire / … Or worse, 1971-1972, trans. Cormac Gallagher, http://www.lacaninireland.com.
- 5.
Lacan, Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst, II 4 (December 2, 1971); emphasis mine: the quotation also emphasises the failure of reaching being as the structural failure of language.
- 6.
Lacan, Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst, I 8 (November 4, 1971).
- 7.
Aristotle uses the expression at several points of his Ethics and Politics. See Ethics: Writings from the Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes and Anthony Kenny, trans. Anthony Kenny (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); and Politics: Writings from the Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).
- 8.
René Descartes’s formulation is included in the Principles of Philosophy, whereas it appears as “Je pense, donc je suis” in the Discourse on Method. It is important to point out that Descartes never advocated animal cruelty nor did he claim that animals do not suffer pain. But such pain, for Descartes, cannot be fully experienced as such because the animal lacks language and awareness. Despite this subtle differentiation, the implications of Cartesian thought for the lives of animals remain disastrous. See A Discourse on Method (1637), trans. John Veitch (N.p.: N.p.) Gutenberg Project, 2008, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59/59-h/59-h.htm; and Selections from the Principles of Philosophy (Latin ed., 1644), trans. John Veitch (N.p.: N.p.) Gutenberg Project, 2003, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4391/pg4391-images.html.
- 9.
Immanuel Kant, “Duties to Animals and Spirits,” in Lectures on Ethics (1775-1780), trans. Louis Infield (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 241.
- 10.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Hegel, The Human Spirit: A Translation of the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805-1806), trans. Leo Rauch (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983).
- 11.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
- 12.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
- 13.
Michel de Montaigne, “An Apology of Raymond Sebond” (ca. 1588), in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965), 331. The citation is from the section “Man is no better than Animals.”
- 14.
David Hume, “Of the Reason of Animals,” in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), vol. 1, bk. 1, pt. 3, section xvi (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896), 176.
- 15.
Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, chap. 17, sect. 1 (London: T. Payne, 1789), cccix; emphasis in the original. Extensive footnote in the section on the limitations of jurisprudence in which Bentham discusses the reduction of animals to the status of things following the neglection of legislation.
- 16.
Jean François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 56-57. I use Lyotard’s notion of the différend to underline the silence that surrounds Montaigne’s and Bentham’s own interrogation of the discourse of philosophy—knowledge constituted through the act of silencing animal subjectivity and through the (human) horror imposed on animality.
- 17.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).
- 18.
Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 33.
- 19.
Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1985).
- 20.
Charles Darwin, “Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Animals,” in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1871), vol. 1, chap. 2, 34-69, at 40, http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F939.1&viewtype=image&pageseq=1 (accessed May 30, 2020).
- 21.
Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 8 and 1.
In his anthropological work in the Andes, Kohn recounts how human encounters with jaguars are based on the force of “seeing” (1) the opponent as predator or meat. Kohn also cites Terrence W. Deacon’s Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), in noting that, as symbolic beings, humans share “other semiotic modalities with the rest of nonhuman biological life” (8).
- 22.
Emmanuel Levinas, “The Name of a Dog, Or, Natural Rights,” in Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Thought, ed. Matthew Calarco and Peter Atterton (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 47-50. This short article first appeared as “Nom d’un chien ou le droit naturel,” in Difficile Liberté (Paris: Le livre de poche, 1963), 233. The English translation was included in Difficult Freedoms, trans. Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 151-53.
- 23.
Levinas, “Name of a Dog,” 48-49.
- 24.
Levinas, “Name of a Dog,” 49.
- 25.
Levinas, “Name of a Dog,” 50.
- 26.
Levinas, “Name of a Dog,” 49.
- 27.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Encore, 1972-1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1999). The first apparition of the term lalangue as language of the Real occurs, appropriately, on the occasion of a lapsus on the part of Lacan with regard to a comment on the Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, which he terms by mistake Vocabulaire de la philosophie. In L’étourdit (dated July 14, 1972), and in the Seminar Encore (June 26, 1973), Lacan will develop the relation of lalangue with the language of the maternal and the infant’s first babbling. See Dominique Simonney, “Lalangue en questions,” Essaim 29, no. 2 (2012): 7-16, 10.3917/ess.029.0007.
- 28.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XII: Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis, 1964-1965, trans. Cormac Gallagher (March 17, 1965), 165, http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/12-Crucial-problems-for-psychoanalysis.pdf (accessed May 30, 2020).
- 29.
For a discussion of the metaphors of animality used by Lacan throughout his work and the significance of their increased use in the late work on the Real, see Buse, “Dog and the Parakeet.”
- 30.
Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion (1948/1973), trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 20. The original French, Théorie de la religion, was drafted in 1948 and first published by Gallimard in 1973. Throughout his Seminars, Lacan engaged at many points with the work of Martin Heidegger and Georges Bataille.
- 31.
Bataille, Theory of Religion, 23.
- 32.
Bataille, Theory of Religion, 24.
- 33.
Jill Marsden, “Bataille and the Poetic Fallacy of Animality,” in Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Thought, ed. Matthew Calarco and Peter Atterton (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 41.
- 34.
Marsden, “Bataille,” 41.
- 35.
Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 198. Heidegger’s lectures were given in 1929-1930.
- 36.
In The Open (Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts), Agamben also mentions the work of Hans Driesch, Karl von Baer, and Johannes Müller, of whom Jakob von Uexküll was a student.
- 37.
Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts, 198.
- 38.
These terms are used in the original German. Innenwelt signifies interiority, literally the interior world. Umwelt, instead, is not simply the exterior world. As Agamben points out, Uexküll carefully distinguishes “the Umgebung, the objective space in which we see a living being moving, from the Umwelt, the environment-world that is constituted by a more or less broad series of elements that he calls “carriers of significance” (Bedeutungsträger) or of ‘marks’ (Merkmalträger), which are the only things that interest the animal” (Agamben, The Open, p. 40).
- 39.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1991), 137.
- 40.
Lacan, Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I, 138.
- 41.
Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). In a deconstructive gesture, Derrida coins the term animot by playing on the assonance of the word, which contains the term word (mot), with the French plural for animals (animaux).
- 42.
Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts, 210; emphasis in the original.
- 43.
Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts, 210.
- 44.
For a discussion of biopolitics in relation to mere life, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
- 45.
Donald R. Griffin and Gayle B. Speck, “New Evidence of Animal Consciousness,” Animal Cognition 7 (2004): 5-18, 10.1007/s10071-003-0203-x. See also Stephen Walker’s Animal Thought (London and New York: Routledge, 1986), for a documentation of the neurophysiological similarity between human and non-human animals. Generally speaking, the presence of pain and pleasure centres across species, and the similarity of the neural mechanism responsible for brain behaviour in vertebrates, have been well documented.
- 46.
Preti, Antonio. “Suicide among Animals: A Review of Evidence.” Psychological Reports 101, no. 3 (2007): 831-48. 10.2466/2Fpr0.101.3.831-848.
- 47.
Indeed, Bernard E. Rollin has shown how the attribution of “mental states” is dependent upon the possibility of morality and how the exclusion by science of much data for consideration “is in large part determined by our metaphysical commitment and associated values.” See Rollin, The Unheeded Cry: Animal Consciousness, Animal Pain, and Science, 2nd ed. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2017).
- 48.
In addressing Lacan’s position with regard to animality, Hub Zwart reads Lacan as claiming that animals lack the lack. Zwart’s article contains a productive discussion of the implications of Lacanian analysis for the realm of ethics—our moral obligations to an ethical treatment of animals—but his claim with regard to the position of the lack in Lacan’s discourse is not substantiated by a reading of either Écrits or Seminars. Admittedly, Lacan seems to gesture in this direction but only in the unravelling of his own reflections on the unconscious. We should also remember the oral delivery underpinning Lacan’s Seminars, in typical European teaching style. Although Lacan did have notes, he also produced much of his thought in the course of his delivery, which confines many of the comments on animality to by-examples less thought out than they would otherwise be. As Buse has noted in “Dog and the Parakeet,” the status of the animal world undergoes a change as Lacan’s thinking moves increasingly toward the register of the Real in his late Seminars. See Hub Zwart, “The Elephant, the Mirror and the Ark: Rereading Lacan’s Animal Philosophy in an Era of Ontological Violence and Mass Extinction,” Journal of Critical Animal Studies 12, no. 1 (2015): 1-32.
- 49.
Jacques Lacan, Television, trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson. Special issue, ed. Joan Copjec, October 40 (Spring 1987): 9; emphasis mine. https://www.jstor.org/stable/i231783.
- 50.
Lacan, Television, 10.
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Capperdoni, A. (2021). Does the Animal Desire?. 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_9
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