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Abstract
This essay discusses the notion of “animal personhood” in cinema (Planet of the Apes, 1968, literature (Franz Kafka's “A Report to an Academy,” 1917; and J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, 2003) and legal and political debates about animal rights. It points out that the fictional, legal, and political debates about animal personhood rely on a series of recurring rhetorical figures and the evocation of a scene in which animal personhood is “staged.” This scene, in which an animal addresses a human being, is of a particularly ambivalent nature. It carries pathos, but it is also offered as something playful, or even slightly silly, which threatens to undermine the “seriousness” of the debates about animal rights. The essay proposes that is not a coincidence, but that the question of “seriousness” is at the very heart of our understanding of animal personhood.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution [1963] (London: Penguin, 1990), 106–07.
2. Ibid., 107.
3. Ibid., 106 (added emphasis).
4. Ibid. (added emphasis).
5. Ibid., 293, n. 42.
6. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life>, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 7.
7. Ibid., 7–8.
8. Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1978), 181–82.
9. Cary Wolfe, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
10. Wolfe cites the example of the Environmental Committee of the Spanish Parliament, which approved resolutions to grant basic rights to great apes on June 25, 2008; ibid., 11.
11. Planet of the Apes (dir. Franklin Schaffner, 1968). Lauren Berlant argues that a distinction between the “silly” and the “serious” often relies on an ideological distinction that tacitly accepts what counts as “serious” questions; Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 12ff. See also Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 20ff.
12. Franz Kafka, “A Report to an Academy,” in The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, trans. Stanley Appelbaum (New York: Dover, 1996), 81–88.
13. Pierre Boulle, Planet of the Apes [1963], trans. Xan Fielding (London: Vintage, 2011).
14. See Eric Greene, Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race and Politics in Films and Television Series (Jefferson: McFarlane, 1996) for an in-depth description of the film's reception. Green cites Sammy Davis, Jr., who publicly called it “the best film about black–white relations he had ever seen”; ibid., 2. For an excellent analysis of its explicit and implicit references to race, see Susan Bridget McHugh, “Horses in Blackface: Visualizing Race as Species Difference in Planet of the Apes,” SAQ 65, no. 2 (2000): 40–72.
15. Greene, Planet of the Apes as American Myth, 34, 39. See also Adilifu Nama, Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 128: “The tribunal scene alludes to the institutional racism similar to that defined in the 1857 Dred Scott case, which articulated that a black man […] had no standing as a citizen and therefore no standing before the court.”
16. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
17. Boulle, Planet of the Apes>, 129. This quote does not return in the film adaptation.
18. Paraphrasing French linguist Emile Benveniste, Barbara Johnson explains: “The notion of ‘person’ has something to do with presence at the scene of speech and seems to inhere in the notion of address. ‘I’ and ‘You’ are persons because they can either address or be addressed, while ‘he’ can only be talked about. A person who neither addresses nor is addressed is functioning as a thing in the same way that being an object of discussion rather than a subject of discussion transforms everything into a thing”; Barbara Johnson, “Toys R Us: Legal Persons, Personal Pronouns, Definitions,” in Persons and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 6. See also Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1972).
19. Boulle, Planet of the Apes>, 139.
20. On prosopopeia, see Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 67–82.
21. “Anyway, I don't want any human being's opinion, I merely wish to disseminate information; I am merely making a report”; Kafka, Metamorphosis and Other Stories>, 88.
22. Ibid., 81.
23. Ibid., 87.
24. Ibid., 83.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. For example, Iris Bruce, “Kafka and Jewish Folklore,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kafka, ed. Julius Preece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 157. Max Brod hailed the story at the time of publication as “the most original satire of assimilation which has ever been written”; cited in Iris Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism: Dates in Palestine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 130.
28. Martin Buber, I and Thou [1923], trans. Walter Kaufmann (London: Scribner, 1970).
29. Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. Karen Pinkus and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 25ff. See also Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), for a suggestion how a cultural “frame” determines which lives are recognizable as “human.”
30. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue that the coughing of the ape, which returns throughout the text, forms a “refrain that is an expression of pure sonority” and turns “syntax into cry”; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 13, 26.
31. To put it in ape terms, they choose the side of the progressive chimpanzee Zira over that of Honorius; The Great Ape Project: Equality beyond Humanity, ed. Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri (London: Fourth Estate, 1993).
32. For example, see http://www.orangutan.org.au/testimonials//.
33. Singer and Cavalieri, Great Ape Project, 2.
34. Jane Goodall, “Chimpanzees – Bridging the Gap,” in ibid., 10–18, 10.
35. Ibid., 11.
36. Ibid., 18.
38. Norm Phelps, The Longest Struggle: Animal Advocacy from Pythagoras to PETA (New York: Lantern, 2007), 99–100. See also Richard Ryder, Animal Revolution: Changing Attitudes towards Speciesism (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2000), 82–83.
39. Donna Haraway, “Apes in Eden, Apes in Space: Mothering as a Scientist for National Geographic,” in Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), 133–85.
40. The episode of the donkey brought to court was commemorated in a popular song: “Bill's Donkey was brought into court / Who caused of course a deal of sport. / He cocked his ears and op'd his jaws / As tho’ he meant to plead his cause”; cited in Jill Bough, Donkey (London: Reaktion, 2012), 56.
41. “Donna Haraway Reads the National Geographic on Primates” (1987), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLN2ToEIlwM. For an analysis of this lecture, see George Yudice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). Yudice points out that Haraway's analyses of “first contact” scenes typically provoke “a report of hilarity from the audience” (41), while her lecture is presented with the “timing of a standup comedian who brought the house down” (42).
42. “Humanity Dick” recently became the hero of an illustrated children's book: Catherine Struve, The Little Donkey Who Went to Court (Createspace [independent publishing], 2014).
43. J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). The lectures were later included in Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (London: Vintage, 2003). All citations will be taken from Elizabeth Costello.
44. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 114.
45. See Peter Singer's comments in Coetzee, Lives of Animals, 85ff. This response is complicated by its being presented as a fictionalized dialogue between him and his daughter (the fictional conceit, of course, echoing Coetzee's).
46. She mentions Aquinas, who argues that the souls of animals die with their bodies, and Descartes, who regards animals as biological automations; Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 78.
47. Ibid., 80.
48. Ibid., 18ff.
49. Ibid., 19.
50. Hannah Arendt, “Prologue,” in Responsibility and Judgment>, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2003), 12.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Yasco Horsman
Yasco Horsman is Associate Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at Leiden University, the Netherlands. He is author of Theaters of Justice. Judging, Staging and Working Through in Arendt, Brecht and Delbo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).