tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post8969236510640565011..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: NO FILTER: Suffering, Finitude, and other supposed truths about animalsCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-53562724857938622002016-06-10T03:27:38.374-04:002016-06-10T03:27:38.374-04:00Hi Steve, thanks for your comment. I have to confe...Hi Steve, thanks for your comment. I have to confess that I've avoided DISGRACE, which strikes me as rather perverse as an animal studies person (it's canonical!). I've been going off the Coetzee collection with Costello and commentary by Singer et al, which manages to do the postmodern narrative thing with philosophical commentary, some of it narrative (like Singer's) and some not as postmodernly sophisticated as Coetzee's (like Singer's). In an earlier draft of the section, I had a long, unfortunate clause about Costello, Coetzee, and postmodern mediation, which I deleted, beecause the Costello line Lacapra's going after is basically a sentiment one can find lots of places (there's even an animal rights book called ETERNAL TREBLINKA, which I've not read, but if it's anything like the misguided and sloppy DREADED COMPARISON [reading animal rights via slavery], yikes, no thanks).<br /><br />So! It's a bit of cheap shot for me, maybe, and less so for Lacapra, because he's going after canonical figures, but the Costello is there not because she's complicated, or postmodern, but because the attitude -- "identification was what was lacking" -- is so common. She's there as a representative figure rather than an occasion for analysis in herself, if that makes sense.<br /><br />Now, in re: first paragraph - politics <i>can</i> have the goal of redressing suffering, though what comes to mind is Upton Sinclair's famous complaint about reaction to <i>The Jungle</i> ("I aimed for the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach"). I think folks, including me, have tended to think that revealing suffering leads to identification, empathy, and the desire to end it because:<br />1. it's a logically compelling argument. the pieces just fit<br />2. we're (you and me and maybe Jeffrey, but I dunno, man) basically good people, and we certainly wouldn't respond sadistically.<br />But people do, and I think that has to be acknowledged. Hoping the thing I'm working on right now can explain how this works a bit more.medievalkarlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12440542200843836794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-21281206588232514622016-06-09T07:10:07.152-04:002016-06-09T07:10:07.152-04:00This is great & thought-provoking stuff, Karl....This is great & thought-provoking stuff, Karl. I'm wrestling with the implications of reconsidering the politic efficacy of suffering -- on the one hand, one doesn't have to look far to see that evidence of suffering can incite, rather than move people to attempt to redress, cruelty (viz, 21c US politics, among many other examples). But if politics does not have an element of redressing suffering in its motivating structure, is it only a mechanism for producing in-group solidarity? That seems possible, in a sort of Game-of-Thrones/Machiavellian sense, but it also seems, well, a bit grim.<br /><br />I also wonder if Coetzee can do more here than you currently ask him to do. I've not been back to the novel Elizabeth Costello in some time, but my memory is that Coetzee works the full novelistic irony-machine around, against, and in support of her animal rights lectures. But for me Coetzee's most searing depiction of the human relation to animal suffering comes in the last image of Disgrace, in which the narrator "gives up" on a dog in the animal shelter in which he works. The language -- "Yes, I am giving him up" -- has haunted me since I first read the novel. Can you work your critical animal studies magic and explain it to me?Steve Mentzhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02927244468764583378noreply@blogger.com