THE FRIENDS OF MY FRIENDS

Abstract

Relations between humans and animals occur under myriad forms and with profound richness. However, taking account of these relations often poses a considerable difficulty. That humans have a strong interest in many other animals, and that humans give rise to a reciprocal interest among many animals, is an important cultural and evolutionary occurrence. Common living and the sharing (or co-constitution) of territory often give rise to social ties between humans and animals. It is important to study the material dimensions that render possible friendship between species. Distance often complicates the material proximity of these relations. The human voice and music are significant conduits of communication between species. Excessive focus on formal symbolic communication has often occluded the significant affective exchange that takes place between species by means of human voice and language. Music, as explored by Jim Nollman, constitutes a “privileged vector” of interspecies communication.

Keywords:

• interspecies music
• voice
• material dimensions of friendship
• affective communication

Notes

Translated from the original French by Jeffrey Bussolini. Initially published by Le Seuil (Paris, 2007). This excerpt is from the forthcoming Columbia University Press translation The Friends of My Friends: On Animal Friendship.

1 This is dampened by the fact that the rays were mutilated for the activity, as their stingers were removed.

2 This criterion of successful communication was initially proposed by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh in her work with the bonobo Kanzi.

3 Patricia Anderson evokes in this regard the “fids, feathered kids,” regarding the place of parrots in certain American families.

4 For a critical analysis of such projects from this perspective, cf. Lestel, Paroles de singes.

5 Apart from apes, cats are the animals that are genetically the closest to humans. Stephen O'Brien, a specialist in the biology of cancers and HIV, compares the genome of the cat to that of the human. This information would no doubt have made Jacques Tourneur happy given the topic of one of his most famous films, La Féline. Cf. O'Brien and Anton, “The Family Line,” and O'Brien, Weinberg, and Lyons, “Comparative Genomics.”

6 This is Richard Connor, one of the best American dolphinologists.

7 There is not only worrying strangeness, attractive and troubling strangeness can exist as well.