'Posthuman Compassions'

Elisabeth Arnould-Bloomfield’s ‘Posthuman Compassions’: Exploring differences between Derrida and Haraway’s deconstructions of traditional understanding of sympathy as well as their respective approaches to compassion

INTRO

(P1) Elisabeth Arnould-Bloomfield (A-B) kicks off her essay with an emotional appeal that she recognizes as somewhat sentimental: “what happens when I watch a creature suffer or when I share in my dog’s joy?”

• Emotions and compassion in particular, have made a comeback in theoretical approaches to nonhuman ethics. She defines compassion as a “deeply affective way of sharing another’s emotion.”
• Invoking Derrida, Donovan, Haraway, and others, she lends their critical klout to the notion that compassion serves as the foundation for human treatment of nonhumans by providing “fundamental means of forging the ethical bond” with nonhumans and a  “new understanding of responsibility and relationships.”

(P2) This notion is not so simple as emotion over reason, differing in critique and nature of sympathies.

• Contemporary theories of compassion are heterogeneous; include:
• ‘Feminist care tradition’ (which has been marginalized)
• Derrida’s aporetic compassion (which has been in the spotlight)
• Mary Midgley’s mix of affect and cognition
• Acampora’s embodied “symphysis”
• ...without much rhyme or reason as to which gets preferential treatment

(P3) Susan Fraiman sees FCT marginalization as a consequence of recent reassessment of animal scholarship under the authority of Derrida’s posthumanist legacy.

• Cary Wolfe and Matthew Calarco have called for a deconstruction of the humanist assumptions still at work in the animal studies model.
• Critiques of cultural studies’ subjects and practices have dismissed ecofeminists

(P4) A-B isn’t sure marginalization of feminist animal ethics is as uniform or unwarranted as Fraiman:

• Popularity of Haraway proves feminist thinking about animals is well received
• Derrida’s appeal is not just fashion but stems from his critique of residual humanism often present in contemporary iterations of sympathy
• Too many fem. symp. theories remain close to subjective/mimetic templates of enlightenment despite affective charge
• Derridean posthumanism and Haraway’s “hybrid” interspecies compassion both combat this:
• Liberate compassion from anthropocentrism; result in “posthuman sympathy dedicated to radical otherness

(P5) Turns to a joint study of Haraway and Derrida due to their willingness to “make a mess” out of affective ethics

• Derrida’s “negative” compassion lies in the inability to identify with another’s pain
• Haraway argues that for sympathy seen in companion species’  “dance of relating”
• Both are willing to deconstruct traditional understandings of sympathy - which is what A-B is setting out to explore

DERRIDA

(P6)In Melancholia’s Dog, Alice Kuzniar critique’s Derrida’s claim that “mortality [is] the most radical means of thinking the finitude that we share with animals” as a too-easy anthropomorphization.

• Question possibility of a sympathy described as powerless participation in the ‘vulnerability of animal existence’  
• What it means to share another’s unknowable suffering
• Reflect on paradoxes of powerless compassion
• A-B finds this provocative, but “would like to propose, instead, that Derrida’s insistence on mortality—the passivity and powerlessness of suffering—changes the nature of compassion.
• It “strips away all the conventional justifications for kindness to animals, [which] are part of the rational, humanist culture that doesn’t get to the heart of the matter,” and:
• Proposes a sympathy that is ethical only because it is aporetic (an impasse/unavoidable/inherent)

(P7) Not alone in finding radical consequences of Derrida’s interpretation

• Instead of asking ‘ can they suffer,’ he asks: ‘can they not suffer?’
• Suggests animal’s ability to suffer is ‘rather the inability not to suffer, not to be wounded and vulnerable in their bodies: being able to suffer is possibility of impossible/nonpower/anguish

(P8) Derrida alters our understanding of compassion and ethics by focusing attention on embodied vulnerability we share with animals

• Anthropocentric ethics only sees animals through capacities they share with us, relies on a sympathy that identifies with the animal’s predicament to assess pain and moral worth
• In this sympathy, suffering is measurable through similarity to human suffering
• Derridean claim that suffering is powerless and therefore not animal or human changes the moral scheme: pain is powerless/incapacitated capacity and cannot be assessed: only measured by affect
• Pain cannot evaluate its own suffering: animal body suffers, not autonomous subject
• Experience of pain is that of being affected by the otherness of mine or another’s body and therefore unsettles autonomous subject/humany - opens to outside/animality of death

(P9) Derrida’s idea that we suffer passively as animals (not just with) implies compassionate experience that challenges humanist sympathy

• Experience questions ‘auto’ (autonomy, autobiography, etc)
• Reminds us we’re always other: in/ahuman in the beginning
• Radically challenges subject experience of compassion theories based on Hume, Schopenhauer, Mercer.
• In their scheme, sympathetic subjects remain the source of knowledge (the animal suffers like them) and the granters of rights
• Ontological difference reduced through imagination, brought to moral similitude
• Derrida’s compassion depends on animal and human pain as ontologically identical, share otherness and unknowability
• Compassionate subjects recognize familiar otherness/powerlessness and only perceive in the other’s pain, the radical inability of their own.

(P10) Durrant, Coetzee, Derrida: compassion is linked to ignorance or aporia.

• COetzee: knowing not to know undoes logic of self certainty
• Derrida: experience is aporetic and interruptive
• Derrida’s nonpower/possibility suggests a sharing that awakens us to impossibility: to the reality of each other’s pain, which calls and eludes us
• Missed experience affects us profoundly in compassion - touched by elusiveness and proximity of each other’s pain
• Compassion has to endure aporia to elicit sympathy - has to remain an ordeal (like sharing mortality) - so the point is that we never know, and never share the meaning, only the passion of meaning in the ordeal of aporia

(P11) Derrida: compassion’s ordeal is condition of responsibility/ethics: in impasse, I encounter impossibility of others’ pain.

• Within impossibility, possibility of justice: permanent call of the other and the subject is always too late or cannot access
• Such compassion is profoundly traumatic: only encounter other’s pain under erasure
• Derrida’s passionate encounter is an important counterpart to humanist sympathies
• Centers on passivity of embodied suffering and gives meta-ethics that goes beyond subjective recognition of moral standing/rational granting of rights
• By focusing on unknowability of animal suffering, provides ethical experience that is truly attentive to the other (even if it is traumatic/under erasure)

HARAWAY

(P12) Derrida’s model negates impact - critics see abstraction and negativity (too focused on ideology rather than lived experience)

• Haraway rails against negativity: obfuscates understanding of finitude and limits  sympathy
• Like Derrida - true ethical encounters put us face to face with passions of finitude
• But objects to idea that death and passivity of suffering are only tropes for these passions
• Passions of embodiment is not just positive pain but openness ‘to the relentless finitude of becoming with.’ - capability and play as much as incapacity and suffering

(P13) Haraway’s compassion does not experience aporia of the traumatic encounter but endures and flourishes in the mundane practices of relating

• Compassion is still alert to limits of finitude but embeds alertness in quotidian relationships
• Locates otherness in ordinary becoming of animal-human relationships
• Regrounds aporia in praxis / emphasizes COM (relate) rather than PASSION (ordeal)
• But what does it mean?
• “How do we remain committed to the radical otherness at the heart of the compassionate relationship while engaging with others in the ordinary entanglements of becoming together?”

(P14) Look at two Harawayan encounters:

• Cat’s gaze to Derrida: Derrida figured himself naked and ashamed
• May accurately id inadequacy of thought before the other (ilke compassion’s aporia) but misses obligation to look back and engage.
• Lack of reciprocity and engagement make the encounter a failure
• Social scientist to baboons
• Building a relationship might be more productive than the isolating stance of philosophy - scientific stance disturbed animals and created negative bond
• “Only after she began to share in baboons’ collective semiotics could she become a reliable social being. And only then could she carry on with her science.”

(P15) That study depends on relationship is profound

• Both sides exist only in relation to the other - relationships has precedence over the individuals it constructs
• Not encounter between subjects and objects - fluid and dynamic location where ‘partners’ cocreate each other through intra-action
• Process of internal mutual shaping
• This is how beings become who they are (Haraway)

(P16) To fully grasp - must get that Haraway’s notion of cocreation doesn’t just imply enmeshedness, it also suggests we are provisionally created / incessantly redone by manifold connections

• We are both constructed individuals and the ongoing products of a fluid world of multible becoming

(P17) For Haraway, there are no natural, unchangeable animals.

• Nature and culture are only provisional and local categories whose duality is a potent consequence of species relation, not a preexisting foundation.
• Nature is no less subject to becoming than culture
• Questioning foundation of immutable nature suggests a version of the world in which everything is constantly engaged in symbiotic and semiotic connections
• All of us are hybrids - there are no individuals, only becoming with in correspondence.
• Relationships are the smallest pattern for analysis

PROCESS ONTOLOGY

(P18) For Haraway the priority of relationship over entities changes the narrative of finitude as well as that of the encounter with the other

• Derrida’s approach focuses passive becoming on individual and body
• Haraway thinks finitude trans-individually. Finitude is the relation.
• This does not imply death and suffering aren’t individual ordeals, but does suggest that pain is not the only trope for becoming with that connects individuals as much as it fractures them.
• Suggests an ethics based on relationality that emphasizes different way of looking at compassion in relationships

(P19) What does it mean to be compassionate if the otherness to be embraces is no longer sole passion of the other but the common becoming with of the relationship?

• Derrida should have responded to his cat and performed a greeting with it looked at him
• Greetings are embodied signs devoid of denotative function - acknowledgement of relationships and performance of it's change
• Each greeting reshapes the relationship and so it's enacters
• Greeting would have meant ritually making signs (not sense) about a common becming with
• Abandoning the encounter is more appropriative of the relationship (and of the other) than the greeting bc it ontologizes the impossibility of the encounter instead of leaving it to the difference of the relating

(P20) Compassion for Haraway:

• The ability (for non/humans) to participate in a common becoming and to be present to “who and what are emerging in relationships.”
• Capacity not to know each other, but to pay attention to an otherness in common and to the commonality of otherness
• Commitment to paying attention / remaining open to heterogeneity of other and self in relationship is what constitutes the essence of affective relating in posthuman ethics
• Ensures compassion do not get stuck in fictions of subjective sympathies or radical unknowability but remain dedicated to historical, impure relationships and to finite, hybrid “becoming with.”
• To be compassionate in relationship, “I must continually be affected by the other’s significant otherness, and I must also be moved by the ongoing strangeness of our ‘becoming with’ in relation.”

CONCLUSION

(P21) “What happens when I watch a creature sufer or when I share in my dog’s joy?”

• Derrida and Haraway provide contrasting answers:
• Derrida: compassion for the creature requires acknowledging that we share only in the impossibility of its suffering
• Haraway: sharing one’s dog’s joy demands a greeting that acknowledges our joint involvement in becoming.
• They share a posthuman questioning of the subjective narratives of sympathy theory, and in a way, they need each other.
• Derrida reminds Haraway that death is a part of becoming and that we need its figures in order to remain sympathetic to the opacity of the other’s finitude.
• Haraway reminds Derrida that entering the dance of relating is also a way to be attuned to the unnamable being and “becoming with” of interspecies relationships.