Diagrama de flujo de proceso de producción

“But for the moment let us note the following: the response to the question ‘Can they suffer?’ leaves no room for doubt. In fact, it has never left any room for doubt; that is why the experience that we have of it is not even indubitable; it precedes the indubitable, it is older than it. No doubt either, then, of there being within us the possibility of giving vent to a surge of compassion, even if it is then misunderstood, repressed, or denied, held at bay.” (28)

“I have just attributed passivity to nudity. We could nickname this denuded passivity with a term that will come back more than once, from different places and in different

registers, namely, the passion of the animal, my passion of the animal, my passion of the animal other: seeing oneself seen naked under a gaze behind which there remains a bottomlessness . . .” (11-12)

“Being able to suffer is no longer a power; it is a possibility without power, a possibility of the impossible. Mortality resides there, as the most radical means of thinking the finitude that we share with animals, the mortality that belongs to the very finitude of life, to the experience of compassion, to the possibility of sharing the possibility of this nonpower, the possibility of this impossibility, the anguish of this vulnerability, and the vulnerability of this anguish. (28, my emphasis)

–Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am

What is this “possibility of giving vent to a surge of compassion”? An understanding of compassion—or perhaps rather an attempt to do justice to it—retreads two paths already

followed in this thesis on the way to a third. How are we to understand this “possibility” and this “giving vent to a surge” on the way to an understanding of “compassion”? While Derrida does not offer any more suggestions in the immediately surrounding text, I offer a robust

interpretation of this passage by way of resources I developed in Chapter 1: I suggest that the “possibility” of compassion can be understood as another name for “ex-position” (treated in

§1.1), while “giving vent to a surge” is an evocative way of formulating the “aporetic” or

“infinite” experience of justice (treated in §1.2). Compassion, which I suggest hyphenating as com-passion for reasons I detail below, then offers a figure by which the pursuit of justice is condensed and evoked in a way that calls our attention to both our differences from and affinities with other animals while offering a way to avoid exclusively focusing on either differences or affinities.

I already suggested above (in §2.4.1) that passivity could be another name for exposure: to be exposed to forces beyond one’s control to any extent is also to be passive to them. While this formulation is helpful, we should not neglect the double meaning of ex-position as revealing not only an exposure but also a set of positions, dispositions, or predispositions, some held and others possible. I suggest that this other meaning is invoked as the “possibility” of compassion here.

Why, then, does Derrida articulate this possibility as one of “giving vent to a surge of compassion”? We should resist the temptation to dismiss this as some superficial poetic flourish and instead ask: what work does this figure do with more precision or intensity than simply saying “the possibility of compassion”? I argue that it articulates precisely the aporetic or infinite structure we read in §1.2, albeit in a condensed or evocative way. To “give vent” implies the ongoing building of tension that precedes the “surge” of compassion. This precedence can evoke the precedence of the other, who is there before us, the other to whom we are exposed and who is exposed to us, the other who calls on us and fills us with tension that may one day burst out or “give vent” to a surge of compassion. Why a “surge,” then? Perhaps this indicates what is unpredictable in the unconscious accumulation of experiences, relations, moments of witnessing the joy or suffering of other animals that build up and give rise to unforeseen intense responses. Whether this surge arises from the death of a beloved companion animal, the face of a dog at the

park or the pound, the film screen flickering in some tragedy both real and imagined, the wingspan of an eagle floating on high, or any other imaginable or unimaginable encounter, we will never have seen it coming, whether from without or within us. This is what we called the “arrival” of the other or the future-to-come (§1.3). What form this surge will take or what mess it will make in forcing us to reconsider our priorities or relations with other animals will have been unforeseeable, too. But it is not the aim of my project here to catalogue future possibilities; rather, I aim to shift the ground of other readers’ encounters, expectations, emotions and

thoughts, to make a spark or get something started. Whether we call it a “surge,” an “arrival,” an “experience,” whether it is thought as finite or infinite, material or spectral, welling up from the past or entering from the future, what is crucial here is for those words to evoke the intensity of these moments of exposure to others, whatever words may be used.

What would it mean, then, to give the name “com-passion” to this surge, this experience? I mark the word com-passion with a hyphen to mark a difference from the everyday use of this word, to renew its intensity and to evoke several specific differences, which I call passion, gathering, and affinity. To write com-passion is to evoke the word “passion” with the sense of passivity I explored above: what overtakes one, what one cannot resist or prevent, what happens in spite of intervention. When we ask about passion and passivity we “change everything” in our relations with other animals because we come to see ourselves as mutually exposed, gathered together, in multiple relations, in affinity and difference. We witness an “exposition” or revealing of our mutual exposure, and of our positions, dispositions, predispositions toward others. Asking about passion, about passivity lets us ask about others without effacing their irreducible alterity. While holding on to this axiomatic importance of others, passion also allows us to ask about our own passivity, the otherness within ourselves, what Derrida calls “my passion of the animal, my

passion of the animal other” (Animal 12). We too are passive, then, passive to the gaze of, the touch of, the exposure to other animals, and passive to the surge of com-passion that can arrive from within us at any time and carry us along in unforeseen ways.

How can we begin to make this experience of com-passion concrete and livable? As we read in the epigraph to this chapter, Derrida suggests that mortality is “the most radical means of thinking the finitude that we share with animals” (Animal 28), that is, with other animals.

Moreover, and crucial to what I am here calling com-passion, “mortality . . . belongs to the very finitude of life, to the experience of compassion, to the possibility of sharing the possibility of this nonpower” (28). While the word “animal” names a heterogeneous multiplicity of others who relate to life and death variously, as we read in §2.2 Multiplicity, we nevertheless share in that relation, that structure of living on the threshold of death. A call for com-passion, then, calls us to address the lives and deaths of others—to think about how we can help them live better and let them die with grace and without misery, as much as possible or even more than seems possible, with all the multiplicities of attentive differentiation that this would require. This project would be infinite and ongoing, unfinished and disjointed, a response to a call that can haunt us, as we read in §1.3, and testify to a more just future-to-come.

Along with passion, the “com-” of com-passion serves to indicate a gathering-in- common, a bringing together, a sharing of experience or the space of encounter, a charge that leaps across a gap between others. The “com-” of com-passion can name the seemingly unlikely contact, overlap, or encounter that nonetheless compels us in a way that remains irreducibly other, uncertain. This is where we see that com-passion, much like “following” (§2.3) and “ex- position” (§1.1) also does a doubled work of ontology and ethics—com-passion would be both a condition in which we find ourselves and something we can seek to develop, something we are

called to address, even if the precise character of that call and that address remains irreducibly other, uncertain and unforeseeable. Gathering would be a name for the strange contradiction of closeness and distance we find in encounters with others and especially other animals: not only a distance no matter how close, but a closeness no matter how distant. We find ourselves in

encounters with other animals passively at the intersection of a multiplicity of singularities and pluralities, following histories of multiple relations, and yet in noticing this we are also called to multiply those differences, to notice more details and to do so more carefully, to relate otherwise and better, to expose our way of being to being re-positioned.

But my project takes alterity as axiomatic and urgent: what is the character of this

gathering-in-common in light of this, and how can one be com-passionate and gather-in-common with others in the robust sense, without effacing their alterity? In other words, how can we address this apparent contradiction between difference and commonality? While my exposition of the aporetic or infinite character of justice means this tension cannot be resolved simply once and for all, we can try to experience this tension or pursue justice for it by way of the word “affinity”. Here I take a cue from Donna Haraway in her classic text A Cyborg Manifesto,52

where she distinguishes affinity from identity, as a kind of similarity- or rather association-with- differences. For Haraway, the word affinity at once emphasizes both similarity or commonality and differences, rather than exclusively attending to one or the other, where exclusively

52 _{Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth}

Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, 1991, 149–182. See especially 155ff. But insofar as Haraway emphasizes affinity as “relation not by blood but by choice,” I may deviate somewhat from her usage by putting less emphasis on choice, since I maintain that ex- position to others precedes any choices we might make. As Derrida writes in The Animal That Therefore I Am, we are “After and near what they call the animal and with it—whether we want it or not, and whatever we do about this thing” (11), as we read above in §2.3 Following. But insofar as I argue that we ought to respond to that ex-position, perhaps the pursuit of justice could be read as making a kind of choice or decision, a kind of ethical response to the ethical call given by our ontological condition of being related to other animals.

attending to similarity would lead to a simplified politics of identity or homogeneity, risking great injustice by ignoring important differences, and where exclusively attending to difference can lead to a brutal divisiveness, involving an unapologetic explicit or implicit hierarchy between “us” and “them,” one which forecloses the possibility of exposure.

What, then, would it mean to gather affinities between ourselves and other animals? What would it mean to experience the possibility of exposure with compassion? We would have to ask about and attend to the multiple forms of passivity of other animals, ourselves included, according to their multiplicity of differences, doing so in both thought and action. How could this work? If we begin by asking about the passivity of other animals, we can discover a more finely differentiated and specific understanding of the conditions to which they are subjected and indeed to which we ourselves subject them directly and indirectly. By asking about the passivity of other animals, we can ask about their plight without effacing their irreducible alterity— attending to specific passivities like mortality, disease, pain, immobility, desire, flight, play, companionship, and more (even if these passivities also give rise to a burst of activity), without ever being assured that we have somehow once and for all exhaustively understood other animals in their entirety. We would ask: what do these others live with that they cannot escape, and how can we respond to it? We would also come to ask about our own passivities as other animals—as mortal, desiring, limited, land-dwelling, and so on. We would ask: what do we live with that we cannot escape, how can we respond to it, and how do we thereby share an affinity with others? Even our understanding would make a kind of affinity, a kind of contact across differences. And indeed, whatever our passivities are, we are passive in many ways, and this would be irreducibly shared with others and other animals. We would come to see our passivities as sharing an affinity with other animals—an affinity with differences rather than simple identity. That is, we would

not discard the specificity of any forms of humanity nor the specificities of other animals, but neither would we deny that differences relate or defer to one another. This would be the meaning of com-passion for other animals: addressing the passivities of other animals, gathering

differences and affinities by bringing them together in thinking and encounters, and pursuing justice for other animals by way of those differentiations.

But here neither difference nor affinity gets the last word: com-passion and the pursuit of justice keep the conversation or the encounter going and call for continually renewed attentive efforts. Com-passion, according to my reading and writing, would gather under its heading the passivity of other animals, humans included, following and followed, in their multiplicity as singular and plural others, who are irreducibly and axiomatically other. This gathering would testify to an undeniable possibility of exposure, of ex-position, of the inauguration of an infinite and aporetic pursuit of justice with and for other animals, however dis-jointed it may seem. But what is this call for com-passion? What calls—and what calls for justice? I suggest that “the call” offers an invaluable and perhaps unavoidable figure for thinking about, addressing, or pursuing justice—a figure on which Derrida and others repeatedly rely, but about which little has been written. The call calls me; it is this figure to which I now turn.

Chapter 3

The Call: of Justice, for Justice (and of Other Animals)