9
A Wie kann ein Wal mit einer Fliege vergleichbar sein?
A woman reading on a bench in Central Park takes her silver chopstick-style hair pin out of her hair and stabs herself in the neck with it. Meanwhile on a building site, workers on the ground are chatting when all of a sudden a body falls. Thinking the worker just fell off the roof by mistake, they rush over to his dead body, but then another worker falls down, then the third, and yet another and another. As in the famous Magritte’s painting “Golconde”, where identical men dressed in dark overcoats and bowler hats against a backdrop of buildings and blue sky fall down like drops of heavy rain, this scene is catapulting us into the universe of the surreal paranoid science-fiction thriller “The Happening”, directed in 2008 by M. Night Shyamalan. At the same time, a school teacher, still not aware the disaster is already happening, explains how Albert Einstein once said that without honeybees mankind wouldn’t survive more than five years. The dissapearence of the honeybees is no news any more. As we all know by now, it all started in 2006 when the United States was hit by an abrupt dissapearance of whole bee colonies. Since then, it is happening in all parts of Europe, in Italy, Spain, Greece, Belgium, Germany, France, Portugal, Netherlands, etc. Many theories and a wide range of possible causes have been presented, including pesticides, parasites, viruses, environmental changes, and even radiation from cell phone towers. It seems there is still no common agreement among biologists or scientific confirmation what is the real cause for the now called “Colony Collapse Disorder”. But it seems that everyone by now agrees with the prophetic Einstein warning that mankind will not survive honeybees’ disappearance. Why? Because one third of the food we eat comes as the result of bees as the most important pollinators of our fruits, vegetables, flowers and crops. To fully understand the problem of the extinction of any animal species, including the bees, we should turn to Jacques Derrida and his understanding of the Animal. In his address “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” at the third Cerisy-la-Salle conference devoted to his work in July 1997, Derrida says he would like to have the plural of animals heard in the singular and even goes so far to call every act of categorisation that posits the Animal in plural, as “animals”, nothing more than – violence. “Among nonhumans and separate from nonhumans there is an immense multiplicity of other living things that cannot in a way be homogenised, except by means of violence and willful ignorance, within the category of what is called the animal or animality in general”. In other words, what for Derrida is of utmost importance is to avoid speaking generally about animals. For him, there are no “animals”. When one says “animals”, one has already started to not understand anything, and started to enclose the animal into a cage. Why? Because there are considerable differences between different types of animals. Derrida returned to this question just two years before his death, in the documentary film directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering in 2002: “There is no reason one should group into one and the same category monkeys, bees, snakes, dogs, horses, anthropods and microbes. These are radically different organisms of life, and to say ‘animal’ and put them all into one category – both the monkey and the ant – is a very violent gesture. To put all living things that aren’t human into one category is, first of all, a stupid gesture – theoretically ridiculous and partakes in the very real violence that humans exercise towards animals. That leads to slaughterhouses, their industrial treatment, their consumption. All this violence towards animals is engendered in this conceptual simplification which allows one to say ‘animals’ in general”. Violence begins not with the slaughterhouse, but with categorisation. Each time I try to classify, I already
determine. Each time I determine, I assume I know a particular nature – although the opposite is the case: I define and classify according to my own nature. How can a monkey and a bee fit into one and the same category called “animals”? How can a whale be comparable to a fly? The best – at first glance completely absurd – answer is given by the fictious taxonomy of animals described by Jorge Luis Borges in his famous tale “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”. The alternative taxonomy of “animals”, taken from an ancient Chinese encyclopaedia (“Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge”), divides all animals into one of 14 categories: Those that belong to the emperor Embalmed ones Those that are trained Suckling pigs Mermaids (or Sirens) Fabulous ones Stray dogs Those that are included in this classification Those that tremble as if they were mad Innumerable ones Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush Et cetera Those that have just broken the flower vase Those that, at a distance, resemble flies
What Borges succeeded to show more than any other critique of classification, is the arbitrariness of any attempt to categorise the world. Why would the fictious taxonomy where animals can be “those that belong to the emperor” or “those that, at a distance, resemble flies” be more fictional than, for instance, Aristotle’s animal classification or Linnaean taxonomy? It is not by chance that Michel Foucault used Borges’ celestial taxonomy in his preface to “The Order of Things”, admitting how he was amused yet also shaken by it. “In the wonderment of this taxonomy”, he says, “the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the able, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own”. This is the paradox we have to face: it is in the very moment of creation that we limit our own system of thought. “So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals. But for Adam no suitable helper was found” (Genesis 2:20). Genesis tells us that Adam named the animals even before Eve was created. Before the “animals”, there was already language. The Bible classifies the animals into four classes, according to four different modes of locomotion: walking, flying, swimming, crawling. On the one hand, the naming of animals is an act of authority and domination, on the other – it again proves a limitation of our world. We could give a detailed overview of the evolution of classification – from the religious texts, to ancient philosophy including Plato and Aristotle, to Linnaean taxonomy. And no matter how advanced and sophisticated a new classification might be, Borges’ fictional classification would not disappear before our eyes. To really understand the “Animal”, it is not enough to name, classify or define it. To understand the “Animal” we should be able to understand its suffering. And this brings us, inevitably, to one of the most famous episodes from the history of Western philosophy, which is not only marked but determined by the figure of the Animal. It is, of course, Friedrich Nietzsche’s mental breakdown in Turin on 3 January 1889. There are many interpretations of the well-known story of Nietzsche lying unconscious on the pavement of Piazza Carlo Alberto. The most famous says he witnessed how a cab driver was having trouble with his horse and began