TY - JOUR
AU - Essunger,, Maria
AB - Abstract With a common Jewish heritage and a personal relation to the Holocaust, both Primo Levi and Hélène Cixous have a desire, even a craving, to write. They aim to hear the unheard and to re-present the ‘unheard’ in different but distinct ways. Levi uses animal symbols and Cixous not only uses her ‘magical animots’ but creatively elaborates on human and animal differences through what could be called her ‘animal thinking’. I argue that Levi’s animal symbols and Cixous’ animal thinking can prompt a constructive reimagining of how we re-present self and other beyond the confines of the ‘human’. In this article I explore Levi’s and Cixous’ way of interacting with animals and animality in their writings, and relate it to Walter Benjamin’s thinking on human language. Following my discussion of Levi and Cixous, Benjamin’s writing on language is instructive in considering the possibilities and limits to hear the (what seems to be) unheard and its importance to the potentiality of creating conditions for a greater inclusivity in our daily lives. I. INTRODUCTION ‘Stories are much bigger than ideologies. In that is our hope.’1 ‘All biographies like all autobiographies like all narratives tell one story in place of another story.’2 With a common, yet decidedly different, Jewish heritage and personal relation to the Holocaust both Primo Levi (a first-hand witness of the concentration camps) and Hélène Cixous (a second-hand witness of the concentration camps) have a desire, even a craving, to write. They are witnesses of vulnerable voices, voices that risk being mute. They hear the unheard and they re-present it in different and distinct ways. Levi writes directly about the ‘real’ witnesses from the Holocaust (the dead, mute ones). Cixous does not, yet she is always intimately—genealogically, bodily, mentally—related to the two destinies of her Jewish family: the concentration camps on the one hand, and, on the other, the scattering across the earth. She writes on different Others (animals, women, foreigners), but like Levi she strives to make us hear the unheard, and maybe perceive the intimacy—not necessarily understood as likeness—between the unheard (Other) and oneself. Levi uses animal symbols and Cixous not only uses her ‘magical animots’, but creatively elaborates on human and animal differences through what could be called her ‘animal thinking’. I argue that the way Levi and Cixous engage with the mute animal Other can help us reimagine and re-present self and other. It is a matter of moving beyond the confines of the ‘human’—a concept that, when imagined as an exclusive category, has caused the immense suffering and dehumanisation of human and nonhuman animals. In this article I present characteristic and, I suggest, constructive examples of Levi’s and Cixous’ way of interacting with animals and animality in their writings. Walter Benjamin’s thinking on human language, in his multilayered essay ‘On the Language as Such and on the Language of Man’, will serve as a philosophical sounding board when discussing the possibilities and limits to hear (what seems to be) the unheard. In Benjamin’s reasoning there is a call to his reader (or his interpreter, as his text is neither unambiguous nor easy) to engage wholeheartedly in the philosophical question that his text raises, namely whether language should be attributed to humans alone. I will argue that the ability to hear what seems mute—or what is made mute—depends largely on the willingness to reimagine representation and to interact with multifaceted texts that dare to expose themselves as open to different interpretations—even misunderstandings. To hear the unheard, or reimagining representation, is arguably of great importance to the potentiality of creating constructive conditions for a greater inclusivity in our daily lives. II. LEVI’S FROG AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION In 1946 an Italian Jewish chemist wrote a book entitled Se questo è un uomo, or, in English, If This Is a Man.3 Primo Levi’s challenging depiction of hell on earth, or the daily life in a concentration camp during the Second World War, starts with a poem. This poem sets in motion the hard work of philosophically reflecting upon, and even physically engaging in, the complex question of what constitutes a human being, especially in the nonhuman setting of the Shoah. It is a poem that invites the reader to hear the story of what Levi himself, in his narrative, calls ‘sub-human lives’ and, not least, to keep on telling that story over and over again. By the end of the poem the wording, in its form as well as in its content, allude to the Jewish prayer (V’ahavta) that commands believers to remember and carry on the teaching and tradition of their faith. The poem also mirrors Levi’s own mission to pass on the story of subhuman lives—so the story does not fall into oblivion—and to narrate the experiences of the Other, the Jew, the Roma, the homosexual, the disabled person and other Others, of which he is himself a representative. But, as a survivor, he is not what he later on calls a ‘real witness’ of the Holocaust, because real witnesses, the ones who faced the final end, no longer have proper voices, they do not narrate anything and they do not share stories—not anymore.4 This statement highlights the well-known problem of representation. How to (respectfully) give voice to another creature, human or nonhuman?5 This is not the place for an exhaustive examination of philosophical reflections on this problem, but I would like to highlight what I see as a common core to many of these discussions, namely the need for a nuanced sensibility and the necessary acknowledgement of imperfection in all attempts to represent (in the meaning ‘to speak for’) or re-present (in the meaning ‘to present anew’) reality or the Other, might it be another fellow being, an animal, or God. An important starting point for my reasoning in this article resides in my conviction that poetic language and stories have a special ability to lay bare different (even conflicting) perspectives and meanings, as they (often) are characterised by intriguing paradoxes, suggestive symbols, provocative lacunas and other stylistic figures, if the reader cooperates in a hermeneutical and/or deconstructive interaction with the text. This conviction could also be described as an endeavour to have faith in the vulnerable communication between the addressee and the addressed (as it is always broken in one way or another) and the insight that all communication is perspectival.6 Levi’s introductory poem, If This Is a Man, not only incarnates the fundamental question of who and what we are, but also the way we (ought to) relate to each other in our shared, shattered world. It starts by contrasting the reader’s safe life situation and the extreme situation of the detainees of the concentration camp. It asks the reader to reflect upon whether the dehumanised lives in the camp are humans at all (‘You who live safe/ In your warm houses /…/ Consider if this is a man/ Who works in the mud /…/ Who fights for a scrap of bread/ Who dies because of a yes or a no /…/’7).8 Levi’s piece of art, of testimony, of politics, of philosophy and of ethics is presenting the vulnerability of human dignity and, rather firmly, asking for human responsibility to shield its continued existence by encouraging the reader to take responsibility for the continued actualisation of the victims of the Shoah: ‘Meditate that this came about: I commend these words to you. Carve them into your hearts /…/ Or may your house fall apart /…/ May your children turn their faces from you.’ It depicts inhuman and inhumane conditions when human dignity is not only questioned but denied. In the middle of this explicitly anthropocentric poem there is a simile highlighting a frog in winter: ‘Consider if this is a woman/ Without hair and without name /…/ Her eyes empty and her womb cold/ Like a frog in winter.’9 This is a double alienation that awakens the reader. Why this frog? And why a frog in wintertime? One cannot say that Levi’s book If This Is a Man is characterised by metaphorical language. It is an unsentimental, nude and yet astonishingly illuminating text that registers and presents raw life. Perhaps the unsentimental stylistic figuration is the only possible way to speak about this inconceivable sub-life? Yet, the text opens with a poem that contains what, at first, seems like a rather non-decisive simile. A woman with no hair or name, with empty eyes, a weak mind and a cold womb, is compared to a frog in winter. At first glance one might only associate her with a creature that is not where she should be; the woman is not in her natural element so to speak, as she is far from home and warmth, and neither is a frozen frog in wintertime. But if one slows down and reflects upon what kind of animal the frog is, and remembers that the reader is explicitly asked to meditate upon what is stated, there is far more information available within this simile (see, for instance, the strophe from the poem ‘Meditate that this came about’, placed directly after the simile and before the severe exhortation). A frog does not have an external ear so the eardrum is attached directly to the skin, nevertheless, the frog has good hearing and, in amplitude, it resembles the hearing capacity of the human being. The frog has a vocal cord, is good at communicating and uses several warning calls and a range of noises. When frogs are born, they are born with gills. As they grow, they develop lungs that they use in adulthood. There is a real metamorphosis going on during a frog’s life, starting from a tadpole that smoothly swims in water, then transforming into a four-legged animal bumping around on the ground. Frogs eat bugs and insects and, at the same time, they are prey for other bugs and insects as well as bigger animals. Moreover, amphibians’ way of life and fertility has been adapted to a high mortality rate. During the annual spawning season a female field frog produces one egg mass of about 1500 eggs. Of these between five or maybe ten eggs survive until adulthood when they themselves can participate in reproduction. The rest of the female reproductive effort that year contributes to the ecosystem in the form of nutrition and food for other creatures. When connecting the cold woman deprived of liberty in the concentration camp with a frog in winter, Levi is giving a concentrated depiction of the subhuman lives that the Jews—and other Others—are leading in Auschwitz. With no possibilities to speak for themselves, or for their friends, they seem mute, but—like the frog—they hear a lot and they communicate rather well with one another. For the Nazis their whispering, wording and singing seem like incomprehensible noises, but among the prisoners themselves there are many distinct voices to be heard.10 Every single prisoner experiences some kind of metamorphosis during her short or long stay in the camp. One may enter as a healthy and flourishing person and die as a stripped skeleton. Or, one may develop what one could call useful skills in the camp, such as abilities to bargain, to win, to steal, to invent, to lie, to survive, which, simultaneously could be seen as destructive and terrible proficiencies. One may, most likely, change from human to subhuman in this dehumanising milieu. Symbolically speaking, one will even eat one another. The mortality rate is sky-high in the camp, and the ones who perish, or at least their few belongings, will be recycled amongst the detainees. One single simile—but a well-chosen one—between a half-dead woman and a frozen frog in winter evokes the unsafe and unlivable lives of the detainees in Auschwitz. Levi continues elaborating on this rich and vivacious figure, but as readers we are already meditating upon the existential question that permeates the narrative from the opening poem to the bitter end; what constitutes a human being? If it succeeds in awakening the reader’s imagination and engagement, the poem manages to combine a feeling of being close to and yet at a distinct distance from what is evoked. Meditating upon the simile, one realises that if there are so many, maybe unexpected, similarities between human beings and frogs, there are, most likely, many, many more similarities between the humans themselves, even if some of them are defined as Other. It becomes striking in this context how tremendously construed the borderline between the Norm and the Other is. In a way, I am always your Other. In other words, one can say that the simile manages to materialise the vulnerability of human dignity in extreme situations as well as opening our ears so that we may(-be) hear the unheard voices of the real witnesses, of Others that could be you or me. According to Levi himself, the need to tell the Others, or let the Other take part in his lived reality, was so immediate and demanding—both before and after the liberation—that it competed with his other basic needs. In the foreword, he states that the book was written to appease that need. But his text is also asking for action, from himself and from all of us, to rethink—and try to imagine on our own—what really happened some seventy years ago and to continue to reflect upon this ongoing history. To the reader his text might actualise a willingness to try to hear (what seems to be) the mute screaming of the real witnesses of the human animals (and other animals such as a frog in wintertime) in the concentration camps. III. CIXOUS’ SINGING THE OTHER AND TRUST IN IMAGINATION In 1990 the French-Algerian poet and philosopher Hélène Cixous wrote about her lost paradise, le Paradis Perdu, alluding to Algeria. She grew up in Oran, with a Spanish-French father and German mother, all Jews. Already as a child she thinks of Algeria as the land of memory. She is frightened, not knowing why, to lose this ‘maternal body’ (corps maternel).11 In Oran, I had a very strong feeling of paradise, even while it was the war and my family was hit from all sides: by the concentration camps, in the north, by Vichy in Algeria. My father was forbidden to practice medicine, we lost French nationality, we were excluded from the public school. But in spite of all the difficulties of living, in spite of the first experiences of anti-Semitism, in spite of the bombing and the threats, it was paradise. The family was full of dreams and creation.12 Cixous continues to write that she was lucky to have estrangement, exile and war as a time and place of birth, as well as the ghostly memory of peace, pain and sorrow. Her first real treasure is the very name of her native town, Oran. This treasure, as place and name, as memory and mystery, is the very incarnation of her lifelong writing, for she must write, ‘or else the world will not exist’.13 J’ai entendu le nom d’Oran, et par Oran je suis entrée dans le sectret de la langue. J’en suis sortie entrée. J’ai découvert que ma ville faisait fruit par la simple addition de moi. Oran-je—Orange. J’ai découvert donc que le mot avait aussi le mystère du fruit. Je vous laisse poursuivre à l’infini la composition, la decomposition de ce nom. Ensuite j’ai perdu l’Oran. Ensuite ja l’ai retrouvé blanche et or et poussière pour l’éternité dans ma mémoire et je n’y suis jamais revenue. Pour la garder. Elle est devenue mon écriture. Comme mon père. Elle est devenue une porte magique ouvrant sur l’autre monde.14 The loss of her father in early childhood marks her authorship, as well as her rootlessness and the absence of a distinct nationality, but not exclusively in a destructive way. It launches a rebellious way of writing, a way of writing capable of making women change history and speak for themselves: l’écriture feminine (woman’s writing).15 This liberating form of expression mixes suggestive poetry with philosophical thinking, engaging storytelling with harsh argumentation and experience-based practice with analytical theorisation. It is her own way of writing, but its visionary purpose is to encourage her reader to write herself, to let her body and her subconscious speak, whoever she is and in her very own way.16 Too often this has been misinterpreted in an essentialist way (excluding men), but the point here is the bodily form of the writing, a writing that includes a severe critique of any dualistic way of thinking.17 In my view, this bodily way of writing springs from her own experience of being what I would like to call a boundary body. This is a body that transgresses borders through different nationalities, different languages, different appearances and different forms of expression. In her autobiographical writings Cixous exposes her own body as a boundary with the aim of crystallizing her Otherness as a female Jewish foreigner in Algeria. This is concretised in her neologism ‘Juifemme’ (‘Jewoman’) as a token of her own predicament.18 Cixous’ self-experienced Otherness, as well as her meetings with other Others, colours her rebellious way of writing. One might easily say that the notion of the Other, or the desire to respect the Other, is a central conception of l’écriture feminine.19 In contrast to ‘a masculine approach, with its tendency to master, to demonstrate, explain, grasp and lock away in a strongbox’ the feminine writer (or, differently put, the bodily writer) is: She who looks with the look that recognizes, that studies, respects, doesn’t take, doesn’t claw, but attentively, with gentle relentlessness, contemplates and reads, caresses, bathes, make the Other gleam. Brings back to light that’s been buried, fugitive, made too prudent. Illuminates it and sings in its names.20 I would like to add another central concept of Cixous’ l'écriture féminine, namely imagination. Here, imagination is meant in its most simple meaning, as a way of describing the phenomena of thinking through images or the creative ability to form (new and unexpected) images, ideas, and sensations in the mind from the input of senses and experiences. The willingness to enable and sing the Other, I would claim, is expressed in a special way. It is expressed through a thrilling trust in the human capability to imagine—or put differently, to think openly in (manifold) images—and actively take part in the poetical and political (re-) construction of a more inclusive philosophy of life. Her suggestive writing aims at, and often manages to, destabilise the way one thinks and what one sees, even the very way one perceives one-self. Even with small linguistic vehicles, she questions fundamental values. For example, Cixous writes about le fourmi, a male ant (in French, the ant is a female, la fourmi). A grammatically male ant is rare, it destabilises, it provokes, and it changes. When un fourmi appears in my texts, it surprises me and it is surprising, this is inevitable. Un fourmi attracts attention; it puts into question: la fourmi, le fourmi, ourselves—everything. As soon as something of this type moves, everything vacillates. With un fourmi, one can make the world tremble, if you think about it. With, in addition, all that can be deployed as signifying associations: this is what Derrida does; he has gone very far straddling un fourmi.21 She acts through novels, theoretical essays, dramas and critical poetry when she continuously imagines what it means to be human. Imagine is a proper word for describing her political and poetical philosophy as it is characterised by tentative thinking, acknowledged dreams and critical belief. Her sensuous narratives—permeated by word plays, symbols and voids—all call for an immediate and indispensable reading response, or, in Cixous’ own words, the act of lirécrire (translatable as readwriting or writereading). This means that you need to work with the text and participate in a relationship of encounter, courage, opening, discovery, change and exchange. Cixous’ writings actualise a need to imitate a child’s way of perceiving the world, or, maybe, playing with it, to understand it.22 One needs to use one’s imagination to unfold the meaning of her multilayered texts that want to ‘make the Other gleam’. Cixous often turns to animals to open our minds, open our willingness to imagine our reality anew. When describing herself as a child, marked by her own Otherness, she is enclosed by other Others and the reader needs to reflect creatively on—or imagining anew—human difference in relation to each Other and to animals. My first Others were the Arabs, the scarabs, the French, The Germans. My first fellow beings were the hens, the rabbits, the Arabs, the Germans, etc. etc. And what language sang to me in my ears? There were languages: Spanish, Arab, German, French. Everything on this earth comes from a distance even the near. I listened to all languages. I sang in German. I also cackled with the hens.23 On equal terms, different human nationalities and different kinds of animals are placed parallel to each other when presenting them all as her first Others. There is a kind of personal or relational bond between the writer and all her Others. On equal terms, she uses human language and animal language to communicate with all her Others through her boundary body. The reader, a reader like myself for example, can imagine a creative creature that crosses (normative) borders and succeeds in questioning the conventional border demarcation between human animals and other animals. She also explicitly denounces the logic of nationality, represented by Maréchal Pétain, that surrounds her at the same time as she experiences her first human and nonhuman Others and, consequently, later on she adopts an imaginary and far more inclusive nationality. The French nation was colonial. How could I be from a France that colonized an Algerian country when I knew that we ourselves, German Czechoslovak Hungarian Jews, were Other Arabs. I could do nothing in this country. But neither did I know where I had something to do. It was the French language that brought me to Paris. In France, what fell from me first was the obligation of the Jewish identity. On the one hand, the anti-Semitism was incomparably weaker in Paris than in Algiers. On the other hand, I abruptly learned that my unacceptable truth in this world was my being a woman. Right away, it was War. I felt the explosion, the odour of misogyny. Up until then, living in a world of woman, I had not felt it, I was Jewess, I was Jew. From 1955 on, I adopted an imaginary nationality which is literary nationality.24 IV. HEARING THE OTHER (AND ONESELF) THROUGH ANIMAL THINKING The imaginary literary nationality of Hélène Cixous expresses itself, to a great extent, through what could be called her animal thinking and her listening way of writing. In her essay ‘Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey’ Cixous refers to ‘animot’,25 her magical animal words (a play on the plural word for animals, animaux, in French with the word for words, mots). She calls them her ‘borderpass words, the words which cross the eyelid on the interior of their own body’, passwords that transgress borders.26 The neologism could be seen as a symbol of what I would like to call her ‘cross-border thinking’. This is a thinking that loves the passage (French: pas sage in English means ill-behaved or unwise) and the open spaces in-between, challenging ready-made answers, limiting norms and captivating structures. Animals—the fundamental Other and, nevertheless, our reflection—have a special place in the writings of Cixous, not only as provocative wordplays in her poetical texts, but as eye-openers and philosophical friends in her critical thinking. Why should we give voice to the donkey that accompanies Abraham to the Mount of Moriah? Or to an undesired cat? Why should we reflect upon the impact of animals and animal language at all? As a writer Cixous sees herself as an ideal donkey, someone who carries and hears.27 In French the verb ‘to hear’ (ouïr/j’ouïs) is very similar to the verb ‘to enjoy’ (jouir/je jouis), which unifies hearing with appreciation. Born myopic, Cixous is not a friend of broad daylight, which takes her by the eyes ‘and fills them with broad raw visions’.28 She puts it as follows: ‘I do not want to see what is shown. I want to see what is secret.’29 Moreover, one could say that she sees through her ears: I catch everything by the ear, the murmurs, the most enigmatic phrases and the angers also that convulse all my being when a drop of poison is served to me at the tympanum. Be careful because I hear all [tout et tout]. All that is said. All that not being said is said otherwise.30 The Bible does not say a word about the conversation between Abraham and the donkey as they walk the long way on Mount Moriah in Genesis 22. According to Cixous this is not very surprising, but it is a great pity. Without the company of the donkey, the walk that is supposed to lead to Isaac’s death would be infernal. Cixous wants to give the donkey that accompanies Abraham a chance to speak, to give a donkey the floor. Why? Cixous suggests: One does not say foolish things (bêtises) to a donkey, do you agree? Nor to a cat. It is only to another human that one says foolish things, that one chats, that one strays from the point, that one lies. With the donkey, we ride straight to the essentials, and right away. I write on the donkey.31 Maybe this is another way of questioning the love story of the Judeo-Christian faith as it has been told through different religious traditions. Maybe there are Other voices in this multilayered story that need to be imagined or heard? What Abraham really thought, felt and uttered when walking on Mount Moriah may reside in the silenced donkey. To God Abraham might have said foolish things, might even have lied, when affirming the offensive command to sacrifice his beloved son. The presence of the donkey puts an end to the self-destructive play directed by God. If Cixous manages to hear the unheard story of the biblical donkey, she hears unheard cats to an even greater extent throughout her œuvre. In Messie (1996), and in Stigmata (1998), as well as in ‘The Cat’s Arrival’ (2006), Cixous presents the outcome of a human meeting with a foreign cat. An existential event destabilises a woman’s perception of life and love. The decisive point is the unexpected perception of the cat—Thea is happening to the woman—forcing the woman into a sensual relationship with her. This cat is an example of the humanimals represented in the writings of Cixous, animals with languages and senses that question any distinct borders between Homo Sapiens and Other animals. One should remember that according to Cixous, as according to Derrida, animals (might) speak and write: they leave traces, in the snow, for instance, or through their bodies and bites.32 The cat becomes the mistress, the mother, the lover of the woman, mostly due to Thea’s ability to place her life in the hands of the woman without suspicion.33 This specific ability of certain animals could be seen as a powerful passivity that challenges normative structures (philosophical, theological and societal). It is not by force but by trust, dependence and tenderness that they manage to change history, at least the history of certain lives. Cixous’ cat Thea also manages to explain humanity to her. Cixous asks herself: ‘Who would have believed that I could love an animal and imitate a she-cat? And now I believe. I have already learned a lot from her. She brings me closer to the formation of the soul.’34 Certain characteristics of animals, or what one could call ‘animality’ seem to represent desirable qualities for the human being. They also function as (unpredictable and surprising) critical tools for our minds and hearts. The linguistic (and substantive) playing with ‘animots’ might even help to reimagine representation (who can present, represent and re-present what and whom?) and hear what seems mute. V. LANGUAGES, BODIES AND THE POSSIBILITY OF (IMAGINATIVE) RE-PRESENTATION Walter Benjamin has written extensively on language and translation. He shares–, over and above the interest in, and need for, words and languages–with Hélène Cixous and Primo Levi a Jewish origin and the experience of being in exile. I believe there is a common leitmotif for all three of them, namely the fight for the Other, for the different, for those with vulnerable voices. Like Cixous and Levi, Benjamin wants to hear and listen to what in conventional terms is defined as mute. In Benjamin’s suggestive and intriguing text ‘On the Language as Such and on the Language of Man’ he presents not only the main principles of his translation theory, but also his odd and original, yet constructive, concept of the language of things. It is a fine piece of philosophy, but is presented in a special way: it surprises and confounds the reader. It is like a story of creation that interacts with the biblical stories and rewrites Genesis anew. Both in its form and its content it is difficult to penetrate. In this text, according to Kathrin Busch, Benjamin puts forward ‘the thesis that not alone does translation operate between different languages, but that human language itself is generated by a translational process. Human language originally translated nothing other than the language of things’.35 The function of language is normally seen to be one in which things, as they are named, are transformed into objects that can be communicated and categorised. Benjamin counters, according to Busch, that this capacity is preceded by an act of reception. ‘To hear the language of things and then translate it is a condition of any naming process. This type of perception, which cannot itself be based on the transmission of linguistic content, is made possible by human language’s capacity for imitation or mimesis.’36 When extending the concept of language to the language of things Benjamin also introduces a characteristic of language as ‘magical’. Busch continues: ‘By postulating receptiveness as the necessary antecedent to any articulation, he asserts the existence of a passive condition in human speech. The usual relationship between humanity (active) and the object world (passive), once it is reversed in this way, is thus reinterpreted.’37 This broadening of the concept of language itself is expressed by Benjamin himself as follows: ‘Every expression of human mental life can be understood as a kind of language … . It is possible to speak about a language of music and of sculpture, about a language of justice … (or) a language of technology.’38 In Benjamin’s way of reasoning, things speak and thereby they also have a contagious effect on us; the language of things cannot be kept at a distance and this actualises, according to Busch, and I agree, a ‘restriction of the human being’s self-determined ability to act’.39 The political or ethical dimension of translation as a mimetic process derives precisely from the way in which the relation to the world is articulated and from the fact that this articulation cannot be attributed solely to the power of human beings.40 Thinking of a language of things is not easy, even if it is intriguing. I would like to suggest that Cixous’ animal thinking, and her action to make ‘present’ the language and writing of animals—thereby questioning any definite border between human animals and other animals—could be a conceptual bridge between our common understanding of language and Benjamin’s radically extended, but as I see it deeply needed, understanding. This is a challenging thought due to the long history of treating animals as things. Arguably, today there is also a growing tendency to treat our own bodies as (objectified) things. With Benjamin’s way of perceiving reality, through Cixous’ animal thinking, one could start to reimagine material in a more inclusive, living and puzzling way. We all share boundary bodies—material bodies, animal bodies and human bodies—that cut into each Other. No item, no animal, no human animal is isolated; we are all part of a greater and vulnerable whole. Even the rhetoric of Levi, his frog in wintertime, is (at least now) part of the conception of the existential disaster of human history that took place during, and in the wake of, the Second World War. In Benjamin’s reasoning there are some characteristic features that seem to mirror important aspects of Cixous’ and Levi’s way of valuing different forms of languages and unexpected forms of communication. First of all, Benjamin highlights the fact that the human language is but one language among others in the very title of the essay at stake: ‘On the Language as Such and on the Language of Men’. This is also explicitly commented on in his text when he argues that it is a philosophical fallacy to claim that the language of men is to be identified with language as such. Secondly, there seems to be a primacy of reciprocity between the different kinds of languages that Benjamin actualises: none are self-sufficient. There is a mutual need for cooperation between the creative word of God, the language of things and the naming language of humans. Thirdly, there is a distinct emphasis on the passive but continuous creativity that operates in what can be called successful communication. Here, to be successful does not necessarily mean that the communication is undertaken through words and naming, it might also take place through serious listening or imaginative representation. Throughout her œuvre, Cixous listens to and rewrites animal language and animal words. She even talks, in great accordance with Benjamin, of her ‘magic animots’, her animal-words, as mentioned earlier.41 She always names her critical animal-friends and implies that they are the ones imposing their names on her. The name Thea is not a randomly chosen name (Greek theos, for God). Cixous plays further with these animal-god-words in her essay ‘Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey’, where she states that ‘God is dog in the English mirror’.42 Simultaneously, she also states that she has ‘never written without Dieu’—a noteworthy observation as she is widely known for being critical of religion. This statement is followed by more thought-provoking assertions: Once I was reproached for it. Dieu they say is not a feminist. Because they believed in a pre-existing God. But God is of my making. But god, I say, is the phantom of writing, it is her pretext and her promise. God is the name of all that has not yet been said. Without the word Dieu to shelter the infinite multiplicity of all that could be said the world would be reduced to its shell and I to my skin. Dieu stands for the names that have never yet been invented. Dieu is the synonym. God is not the one of religions, the one that is attached like Samson the donkey to the wheel of religions. His true name? We will know it on the last day, it’s promised.43 Cixous, like Benjamin, questions an anthropocentric worldview by letting the (Other) mute speak and even write (animals and things). Nevertheless, it is worth underlining that Cixous is not (at least not primarily) fighting for the rights of animals. Rather, she elaborates, aesthetically and ethically, on the possibilities of animals, or even better, the possibility of poetically expressed animality, to awaken the human mind and make her see herself anew. Consequently, this might be said to strengthen animal rights.44 Neither Benjamin, nor Levi write with the purpose of securing the rights of animals or things, but their way of thinking and writing may still make us think differently about frogs and furniture as well as ourselves. It might also awaken our minds to see the intimacy between the unheard Other (whoever that might be) and oneself. There is an interesting intimacy between what Busch defines as Benjamin’s ‘restriction of the human being’s self-determined ability to act’45—as a way of illustrating the reversed order of naming in human history where hearing comes first—and the absolute need for the existence of the word God in the reasoning of Cixous—as Dieu stands for the names that have not yet been invented. The actualised text of Levi is in itself an illustrative figure of the impossibility of humankind to take care of itself: in the concentration camps there is no naming at all, only numbers. VI. CONCLUDING REMARKS AND CONTINUOUS THINKING Based on my discussion of Levi, Cixous and Benjamin, I suggest that a common goal, with different strategies, can be distinguished amongst these writers to envision the potentiality of a greater inclusivity in our daily lives. All these thinkers cherish a vision of a philosophy of life that invites all thinking, sounding and feeling creatures to be part of the reality that we share, no matter how different these forms might be throughout the world. This vision is multifaceted but characterised by the need for the human animal to take a step backwards and realise that her greatest task might be to perceive, listen to, and engage in the sounds and words of her surrounding reality, from things to animals and Other human animals, and then, together with what or who she has heard, ‘sing in its names’. Even if their strategies differ—from the theoretically demanding philosophy of Benjamin, via the poetical writing and animal thinking of Cixous, to the documentation of Levi—there are common traits to be observed. First, they all eagerly invite the reader to participate in their reasoning through acts of imagination. Benjamin’s reasoning on the language of things is so strange and unfamiliar that it needs almost meditative and creative cooperation—one has to read the text over and over again—to reach understanding. It also highlights the deficiency of the human being as a self-sufficient agent in her own history. Cixous’ writings deliver a vivid network, a creative rhizome—in the language of Gilles Deleuze—for self-generating suggestive thinking that actualises multiple and different ways of enabling and singing the Other.46 In Cixous’ writings one cannot find a particular model, nor a specific theory, not even a well-defined concept to depart from, one can only find different images to relate to. You are forced to use your imagination to think, and rethink, in your own way. Levi’s text starts with a question that firmly demands us to imagine what a human life is or can be. The question abides in the title of a poem and forms a request that invites us to pay attention to the immense risk of seeing the stranger, every Other, as an enemy and its fatal consequences. The announcement of a quiet strange frog in wintertime can be the reason why we start hearing the warning signal before the extinction. It also demands us to retell this story over and over again. Secondly, the three thinkers trust the reader’s potentiality to cooperate in their aesthetic and ethical creations, in their stories. There is no guarantee that the readers of the challenging philosophy of Benjamin, the multilayered writings of Cixous or the simile of Levi, grasps the multifaceted vision of a philosophy of life that invites all thinking, sounding and feeling creatures to be part of the reality that we share. But if they do, the complex, elusive and probing mode of expression is forceful in making the reader reimagine what is presented anew. Representation in a respectful manner is invited, in a multifarious way, open for new perspectives and without final closure, where hearing is the key to reminiscence, understanding and constructive relationality. Arguably the risk of being misunderstood or not read (exactly) as expected is worth taking, if the outcome is a dedicated, listening and thinking reader that participates in the continuous reflection on the potentiality of a greater inclusivity in our daily lives. Such a greater inclusivity might reveal the fact that the unheard (Other) might be, or become, yourself or vice versa, as we are dealing with philosophical, political and empirical divisions between a constructed self and other. Reimagining such constructions might radically change who is inside (or heard) and who is outside (or unheard). Footnotes " 1 Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness (Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), p. 17. " 2 Hélène Cixous, Rootprints. Memory and Life Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 178. " 3 Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo (Torini: Einaudi, 1978 [1946/1947], 8th edn). " 4 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage International, 1989). Originally published I sommersi e i salvati, 1986. " 5 What could be called the problem of representation has been discussed in many fields and by many thinkers. For further reading see e.g. the reasoning of Bauerschmidt, Sölle, Focault and Deleuze, interestingly elaborated by Petra Carlsson in Theology Beyond Representation. Foucault, Deleuze and the Phantasms of Theological Thinking (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2012), or the immense reflections in the wake of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s fundamental question: ‘can the subaltern speak?’, in Rosalind C. Morris (ed.), Reflections on the History of an Idea. Can the Subaltern Speak? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). " 6 I share this conviction with, for example, Roman Jakobson, e.g. Poetik och lingvistik: litteraturvetenskapliga bidrag / Roman Jakobson valda av Kurt Aspelin och Bengt A. Lundberg (Stockholm, PAN/Norstedt, 1974), Paul Ricoeur, “Du texte à l'action. Essais d'hermeneutique II”, Éditions du Seuil (Paris, Coll. Esprit, 1986) Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 1990), Cixous, Rootprints, and Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto. " 7 The full length poem can be readily found on the internet. " 8 The opening poem of Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, my emphasis. Primo Levi, If This Is a Man / The Truce, trans. Stuart Woolf, Abacus; New Edition (1988/2003). " 9 My emphasis. " 10 Cf. the reasoning of Aristotle who claims that it is the speech of the human being (logos) that distinguishes us from the animal that (only) makes sounds or noises (phone). If a human being is not capable of using comprehensible speech, but only makes sounds and noises, she will be condemned to be without morality as well, and, consequently, she will lose her status as a complete social being (excluded from the public society/polis as well as the private home/oikos). Helen Andersson discusses this thoroughly in relation to Frans Kafka’s writings in her article ‘Mellan människa och icke-människa: Livet med och utan pass’, in Elena Namli, Per Sundman et al (eds), Etiska undersökningar: Om samhällsmoral, etisk teori och teologi (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2010), pp. 87–105. " 11 Hélène Cixous, ‘De la scène de l’Inconscient à la scène de l’Histoire: Chemins d’une écriture’, in François Vachemins and Myriam Diaz-Diocretz (eds), Hélène Cixous. Chemins d’une écriture (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1990), p. 16. " 12 Cixous, Rootprints, p. 196. " 13 Hélène Cixous, ‘Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey’, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 148. Cixous’ writing is not a choice, she is ‘seized’ by it, ‘tracked down, besieged, taken’ and it inspires her to ‘wild acts’. To her, writing is good, it is ‘what never ends’, ‘Writing is God’, cf. ‘Coming to Writing’, in Coming to Writing and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 4, 11. See also Maria Essunger, ‘The Right to Write—or Imagining Human Difference Anew with Hélène Cixous’, Język Szkoła Religia 11.3 (2016). " 14 Hélène Cixous, ‘De la scène de l’Inconscient à la scène de l’Histoire: Chemins d’une écriture’, p. 16. " 15 In her early text The Laugh of the Medusa (Le Rire de la Méduse, 1975/1976) Cixous launches a daring form of writing; daring because it puts forward new metaphors for writing (i.e. writing as childbirth or writing process as labour). The author becomes a mother, something that clashes with traditional Western images where the author often is seen as male, and the text and child are set parallel to one Other. This is a conscious attempt to write the body and introduce a female way of writing. This has been thoroughly discussed among Cixous critics. One example is the Swedish literary critic Kerstin Munch who wrote Att föda text. En studie I Hélène Cixous författarskap (Lund: Symposion, 2004). " 16 Cixous writes: ‘Écrire-toi; il faut que ton corps se fasse entendre. Alors jailliront les immenses recources de l’inconscient.’ Hélène Cixous, Le Rire de la Méduse (Paris: L’Arc, 1975), p. x. " 17 Cixous’ favourite example of this way of writing is the (male) French playwright Jean Genet, but her own source of inspiration is also Heidegger, cf. Abigail Bray’s analysis on Heidegger’s influence on Cixous, in Abigail Bray, Hélène Cixous: Writing and Sexual Difference (2004), p. 46. I have written more thoroughly on l’écriture feminine elsewhere, for instance in my article on Cixous and the betrayed memory of the child in Jonna Bornemark, Mattias Martinson and Jayne Svenungsson (eds), Monument and Memory (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2015), pp. 115–27. " 18 Cixous, ‘De la scène de l’Inconscient à la scène de l’Histoire: Chemins d’une écriture’, p. 27. " 19 The literary critic Susan Sellers even states that ‘[f]or Cixous this willingness to enable and sing the Other, rather than appropriate the Other’s difference in order to construct and glorify the self in accordance with masculine law, is the keynote of écriture féminine’. Susan Sellers, Hélène Cixous. Authorship, Autobiography and Love (London: Polity Press, 1996), p. 10, my emphasis. Heather Walton writes interestingly on Cixous’ way of ‘Writing the Other’ in her book Literature, Theology and Feminism (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 152–61. Walton focuses on the influence of Clarice Lispector and her turn to the theatre in her task to write the Other. My focus here remains with what I call her ‘animal thinking’ and its relevance for writing, or singing, the Other. " 20 Cixous, ‘Coming to Writing’, p. 51. " 21 Hélène Cixous, Rootprints, p. 63. In the Appendices to the text, excerpt 1, Jacques Derrida enters into a dialogue with Cixous’ grammatically male ant, le fourmi, and its potentialities. Ibid., pp. 119–27. " 22 See also Maria Essunger, ‘Reveries or Truths: On the Betrayed Experience of the Child in Hélène Cixous’ (Auto-)Biographical Writings’, in Monument and Memory, pp. 115–27. " 23 Cixous, ‘De la scène de l’Inconscient à la scène de l’Histoire: Chemins d’une écriture’, p. 16. My translation. " 24 Cixous, Rootprints, p. 204. " 25 Cixous, ‘Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey’, p. 140. " 26Ibid., p. 140. " 27Ibid., p. 142. " 28Ibid., p. 139. " 29Ibid., p. 137. " 30Ibid., p. 142. " 31Ibid., p. 143. In French ‘bêtises’ means foolish things, but it also alludes to the French word ‘bête’ which can simultaneously refer to an animal or beast and, in a figurative sense, an idiot. " 32 See for instance Hélène Cixous, ‘Jacques Derrida: Co-Responding Voix You’, in P. Cheah and S. Guerlac (eds), Derrida and the Time of the Political (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 43: ‘the whole machine that tends to replace the word “writing” in the ordinary sense by “trace” or the word “speech” by trace, had as its final purpose that writing, speech, trace are not the proper characteristic of the human. There is animal trace, animals write’. Or, when Derrida in 1997 coins the word ‘animot’ it is not only because it rhymes with animaux (animals), but also, as the proximity between the seemingly contrary words mot (word) and muet (mute) suggest in French, in order to insist that words (mots) can be spelled out without a word, so that a cat, for instance, ‘might be … signifying in a language of mute traces, that is to say without word’, The Animal that Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 18. Derrida thus (re)interprets animot ‘after’ Cixous, as discussed earlier in this text, cf. footnote 22. " 33 This is reminiscent of Cixous’ reasoning on the changeling child, a child that is able to do what a man could never do. In its vulnerability it has a special force, extremely powerful, when coming to a parent as an unexpected gift, it is the child that adopt us, cf. e.g. Cixous’ reasoning in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). For further reading on this intriguing theme see also Heather Walton’s nuanced Literature, Theology and Feminism (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 161–6, especially p. 163. " 34 Cixous, ‘Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey’, p. 152. " 35 Kathrin Busch, ‘The Language of Things and the Magic of Language’, trans. Mary O’Neill, eipcp, an international multilingual webjournal, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0107/busch/en, accessed 26/05/2016. " 36Ibid. " 37Ibid. " 38 Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and On the Language of Man’, in Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds), Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings. Volume 1, 1913–1926 (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1997, 2nd edn), p. 62. " 39 Busch, ‘The Language of Things and the Magic of Language’. " 40Ibid. My italics. " 41 Cf. footnote 22. " 42 Cixous, ‘Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey’, p. 150. " 43Ibid. " 44 This reasoning will be extended (elsewhere) in dialogue with Matthew Calarco. His clear treatment of the multilayered research field of animal studies—dividing the research into three distinct approaches, namely identity, difference and indistinction, will serve as a sounding board for my analysis of Cixous’ position in this field. The most intriguing and interesting finding is, in short, that her position concerning our relation to animals, animal rights and the importance of animals in our self-understanding as human animals is neither to be classified as identification, nor difference or indistinction. In my view she covers them all in her own specific way and presents a personal ‘bodyfied’ animal thinking. " 45 Busch, ‘The Language of Things and the Magic of Language’. " 46 The notion of rhizome, as developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattarri, can be seen as a model for understanding our society. Or as Mattson and Wallenstein express it, it is ‘a non-hierarchical structure of notions that procreates in all directions and invites to a multitude of modes of application, re-functions and inoculations’, Helena Mattson Sven-Olof Wallenstein (eds), Deleuze och mångfaldens veck (Stockholm: Axl Books, 2010), preface, my translation. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press 2017; all rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - To Hear the Unheard—Or Reimagining Representation with Primo Levi and Hélène Cixous
JF - Literature and Theology
DO - 10.1093/litthe/frx031
DA - 2017-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/to-hear-the-unheard-or-reimagining-representation-with-primo-levi-and-HoM02GhnyQ
SP - 437
VL - 31
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -