What IS Sex? by Zupancic Alenka; Stockholm Inst Of Transition Staff;

Author:Zupancic, Alenka; Stockholm Inst Of Transition Staff;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2017-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

Human, Animal

Let us now continue our investigation by turning our attention to the philosophical category of the “human animal,” and interrogating the kind of differentiating mapping it implies. Philosophically speaking, the question of the human animal has always been based on double difference. There is, first, the difference that is supposed to distinguish us as humans (be it reason, language, using tools …). On a first level, this difference can be taken just as any other difference that differentiates one animal species from others. From this perspective, humans have a (properly differentiated) place within the animal kingdom; we can put them there, on the evolutionary tree, together with other animals, in all their specificity (and in spite of it). This is a first-level difference, which one could call inclusive, in the sense that it allocates us our own proper place within a differential (animal) structure. We are a specific kind of animal called “humans” (or human animals).

The tricky (and controversial) question only begins here, and could be formulated as follows: Is human difference a different kind of difference? This is the question of the “human exception,” which is usually posited in self-referential (self-differential), and not simply differential terms. The question of whether we are also something other than just another kind of animal always seems to mobilize the divide, not simply between ourselves and animals, but also between ourselves as animals, and ourselves as something else: between ourselves as “human animals” (say, as functioning on the level of basic “animal” needs) and ourselves as something more, or other. That is to say: as human beings, we are not different from animals as “whole beings”; we are partly animals, and partly something very different, even entirely different. The body/spirit difference is the prototype of this configuration, also in its laicized version. In this configuration, the distinction and superiority of the second term is usually testified to by its ability to ignore, or even to turn actively against, the first term, which binds us to animality.

Within this general framework there seem to be two dominant ways of conceiving what human “animality” refers to. In the first, the animal (as in “human animal”) is cast as the figure of an untamed excess. This idea is rooted above all in a specific aspect of the Christian imaginary which, at the same time, invented autonomy of the excess and cast it as sin, “outsourcing” it, so to speak, to the other in us (the animal). Not that it has much to do with how animals behave; to “behave like an animal” can refer here to any kind of human “weakness” understood as an incapacity to control, tame, or suppress that excess. This is the image of an unrestrained, excessive enjoyment.

Somewhat directly opposed to the figure of an untamed excess is the figure of animality as lacking any (real) excess. I would say that this is a predominantly modern figure of the human animal: an organic (and/or symbolic) system closed upon itself, entirely “lawful,” unable to

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