I am in animal

One day I quite randomly wrote the phrase, “I am in animal.” It simply slipped off the tip of the pen. The sentence is a palindrome, and is grammatically and semantically correct. It might sound off, but it works. It carries something uncanny, however, such that it might float about in the head for a while. While plenty of animals end up in us, how often can we say that the human subject, “I,” finds itself in the animal? A palindrome is a sentence that can be read the same forwards as backwards. As in “Madam I’m Adam” (here the apostrophe needs to migrate one over on the turn backward). Now, you have probably noticed — protesting all the while as I expound on palindromes — that in the case of our sentence, “I am in animal,” we are before a near-palindrome — almost, but not quite. We have fallen into the realm of visual trickery. If we were using all upper case letters, I would be wasting my words. But in the case of sans-serif typography, capital “i” — “I” — is often mistaken for a small “el” — “l”: the capital “i,” “I,” tends to be only micro-millimetres shorter and wider than lower case “el,” “l” — barely distinguishable to the human eye. Once one realizes this almost-imperceptible difference, the spell of the palindrome is broken. But how often is a human “I” in an animal? The sentence would be grammatically and semantically correct if “I” were indeed eaten by an animal (like Jonah in the whale, or Treadwell in the bear),“Story of Jonah” in the Tanakh/New Testament/Qu’ran; Werner Herzog’s Grizzlyman. or if “I” somehow found a way of crawling into one.As in cutting into a horse and crawling inside to survive a storm, as described in Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Last Crossing. So one is not sure whether this is just sloppy writing. There’s something “sticking” that needs to be interpreted. Is it being figurative or poetic? Is it a misprint — une coquille? The French word for misprint; I refer to it as the animal crawls into the shell and then abandons it, leaving it behind for others, possibly, to inhabit it. Might the writer have wanted to write, “I am an animal” (as expressed by Bataille)? Since the Darwinian revolution, there has been no doubt in human minds that we are animals. Still, many are stuck on the idea that we are very distinct from other animals — that despite our evolutionary connection to other primates, there is some unbridgeable gap between the human “I” “Prehistory is the key to history because it ‘announces the subject, the ‘I’, it announces ‘us.’” Georges Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 16. (who) and the animal “it” (what). There are humans, and then there are the rest. We distance through nomenclature. Some grain of self-consciousness, political organization, establishment of law and language, and even perversion, makes it impossible for us to be “mere” animals. We are both animal and not animal. So what is it about “I am in animal” that has such a hold on me? The near-palindromic nature of the sentence, read back-to-front and front-to-back but not quite working, is important to the question at hand. The equivalency of “I” (the human subject) with the animal needs to be figuratively thrown out; hence “in” instead of “an.” For, although it has been established once and for all that “I am an animal,” I am also not quite like all those other animals. History demonstrates this. As if humans were one lump, and all the millions of other species another lump — I shun them from my framework but shovel them in by the truckload, mere meat on legs. So what takes me into them? Front-to-back and back-to-front, the true palindrome is a mirror image of itself, caught, looping in its own closed universe like a Moebius strip. As ludic literary figure, the palindrome has something talismanic about it. But in the case of “I am in animal” there exists a slight warp or fracture in that mirror, and this imperfection needs to be factored into the palindromic appearance in order to get off on the right footing. The mistaken identity of capital and lower case letters (the first and last letters of the sentence) is important, for I wanted to incorporate the idea that humans have deceived themselves for millennia into believing that they exist apart from all other beasts — rather than being a part of this greater family — to always be first, at the head of the line! They intentionally forgot their continuity with animals, their boundedness to them. They no longer see the animal in themselves, nor their identity in animals. In speaking about the generalization of “the animal” as a catch-all term — naming all those creatures that lie outside of the human (that which is filled with deprivation, lacking language, rationality, consciousness, Being, and so on) — Jacques Derrida speaks to the irony of the “I,” which is also a term of generalization, a pronoun and not a proper noun, that designates the human as general. Anyone can take the place of the “I”: “Let us set out again from this place of intersection between these two general singulars, the animal (l’animot) and the ‘I,’ the ‘I’s,’ the place where in a given language… and ‘I’ says ‘I.’ Singularly and in general. It could be anyone at all, you or I. So what happens there? How can I say ‘I’ and what do I do thereby?… I import a full-length mirror into the scene. Wherever some autobiographical play is being enacted there has to be a psyché, a mirror that reflects me naked from head to toe.” Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I am,” trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 418. I say “I,” a shifter used by all human beings to address themselves, to convince themselves of a unified singularity in front of the mirror. The fiction works like a palindrome, the looping of the eyes before a whole, a unified “I,” on the mirror’s surface. And yet, the generalized “I” is peopled with so many other beings, so many evolutionary trackings of other creatures within its DNA, mutating and migrating to different parts on that double helix — so much latent animality. We all share that DNA from a common ancestor. And each “I” ingesting so many animals, albeit mostly of select monocultural breeds, stealing their nutritional essence, and shitting out the rest. Protein on protein. Chain upon chain. Enslaved to life. To get back to the capital “I” and the small “l” of our near-palindrome — mirroring itself, but slightly distorted — a play on figurations. They stage an inequality, the capital at one end and the lower case at the other, le majuscule et le minuscule, the powerful and the weak. One at the head, the other at the tail end of the line? The order of language encapsulating subservience. In Indo-European languages, the subject tends to find placement at the start of a sentence, and the object at the end. The capital is reserved for the “i,” the “I” in possession of itself, while the small “el,” “l,” in “animal” is small for a reason, made small because it is lumped in with all the rest of the billions of creatures — not in possession of itself. Or so the human says. Only the human subject “I” possesses, names, and capitalizes on them. Akira Mizuta Lippit has written that the animal still resides deep in the unconscious. Lacan wrote that the unconscious begins from without — it is first in the other, and by extension in the animal, and then internalized in the process of each human being’s development. The self-possession of the “I” is always after the fact — a semblance of self-possession in fact. We incorporate the unconscious. But it also incorporates the “I.” So the animal has come to incorporate our unconscious too. And so many of their symptoms are ours. Humans recognize themselves only through viewing the animal, not by viewing themselves in a mirror. Initially, the infant cannot recognize itself in the mirror; only after a number of encounters will it see its reflection as itself. Is it that the human recognizes itself in the animal first, and, as Derrida comments, it is when the animal stares back at the human that the “shame” of our lost animality shines through? “he single, incomparable and original experience of the impropriety that would come from appearing in truth naked, in front of the insistent gaze of the animal, a benevolent or pitiless gaze, surprised or cognizant…. It is as if I were ashamed, therefore, naked in front of this cat, but also ashamed for being ashamed…. At the optical center of this reflection would appear this thing — and in my eyes the focus of this incomparable experience — that is called nudity. And about which it is believed that it is proper to man, that is to say foreign to animals, naked as they are, or so it is thought, without the slightest inkling of being so.” Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I am,” 372 — 73. We still recognize ourselves in the animal. Giorgio Agamben says something similar when he posits humans as developing with the anthropological machine: “Homo sapiens, then is neither a clearly defined species nor a substance; it is, rather, a machine or device for producing the recognition of the human…. It is an optical machine constructed of a series of mirrors in which man, looking at himself, sees his own image always already deformed in the features of an ape. Homo… must recognize himself in a non-man in order to be human.” Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 26. In mourning the death of animals en masse — factory animals and wild animals and all the rest in between — I have come to feel a greater sympathy for those whom we have excluded from ourselves. And yet I know only that we have suffering in common — and that they are often born to suffer more. In turn I have come to think of humans as a mass of “humanity,” constructed around fantasy and hubris, gobbling up the planet as natural resource on reserve. As a result I came to project an unnatural innocence onto animals. Having been sequestered away from the animal world, I was able to idealize their existence. But this love of animals is itself a fantasy that I created within, while keeping them at arm’s length without. I had fallen into a trap. The very thing I hated about humans was very likely also in the thing I had foreclosed in the animal — the instinct to kill for survival — destruction ensuring future creation. And yet, and yet… Technology has allowed us to instrumentalize the world into a Thing, such that there is nothing co-extensive in it with our Being. This is the difference with animals, this discontinuity, this profane reification of everything for the “I”’s benefit. I realize that I now need to extract the idealized animal from within and find the lower case “i” in the lower case “animal.” This “i” needs to learn to live and work with its given species — humans — to change what isn’t right about the world that our species has constructed — only in our image. If enough “I”s become “i”s, it might result in a detour toward a recognition of our entanglement within a living world. According to Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, in Amerindian animistic belief systems, all animals were once humans. Instead of conceptualizing humans as once being animals amongst animals, as Darwin’s revolution uncovered, animals were once humans amongst humans. It is animals who changed, not us. In this sense the human is still in the animal. The “I” is still in the animal, as we are all related, all connected. And is it not possible that along this vast spectrum of animality, there might be some non-human animals that think subjectively, have consciousness as a first-person singular, as “I”? i am in animal. I am an animal. “I” loses distinction. The spell of the palindrome is twice broken, but the similarities remain. Marina Roy

I am in animal

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