From: "Eric" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: RE: 44
Date: Sat, 22 Jun 2002 11:04:39 -0500


Steve,

Yes, I remember reading somewhere that when a high Jain monk walks down
the street, the other monks sweep the street in front of him so that no
insects are accidentally killed. The ethics of the Jain is that no harm
to life should ever intentionally be done: this from a religion that
pre-dates Buddhism.

In my reading of Lyotard on the subject of humanism, however, I don't
see him as an animal rights activist. Not that the philosophy of the
differend could not be applied to this area; just that it doesn't seem
to be a major concern of Lyotard's. (Somehow I don't picture Lyotard as
a vegan, but really don't know that much about his personal life.)

I want to call your attention to #38, however, because this seems
relevant to some of the issues you raise. There Lyotard states that the
"animal is a paradigm of a victim."  The crucial difference for Lyotard
between the animal and the human appears to be that the animal is one
who cannot bear witness according to the human rules.

In this reading, then, humanism becomes a social construct each of us
enters into by means of a contract, enforced under conditions of duress.
We can only bear witness because language and culture have always
already been previously inscribed. (Do we bear witness to the one or the
other?)

That is perhaps the reason why creatures such as the Wolf Boy who are
birthed outside of these conventions always remain inhuman in a certain
sense. The critical window of opportunity to receive the menaces of
humanity has already passed them by. Yet, still, in figures such as
these as well as in others the authority of the infinite and the
heterogeneous prevails over the rights of man.  

The Cynic proclaims himself a cosmopolitan as he lives in a tub
alongside the Agora.  Or in the words of the ape who speaks in Kafka's
"A Report to an Academy,"

"I repeat: there was no attraction for me in imitating human beings; I
imitated them because I needed a way out, and for no other reason....

With an effort which up till now has never been repeated I managed to
reach the level of an average European. In itself that might be nothing
to speak of, but it is something insofar as it has helped me out of my
cage and opened a special way out for me, the way of humanity. There is
an excellent idiom: to fight one's way through the thick of things."

This is perhaps what it means to be human: to have an idiom to bear
witness on behalf of the "bewildered, half-broken animals" who cannot
speak themselves; to feel a simultaneous agitation of kinship as well as
alienation from what we are and what we never more can be.

eric