Our Dark Side (18 page)

In an astonishing text, Henri F. Ellenberger (1964) compares the various ways in which animals have been kept in captivity. He identifies three: the
paradeisos
of the ancient Persians, in which the animals were at liberty, the zoological gardens of the Aztecs, in which the animals were methodically classified and lived alongside dwarfs, hunchbacks, the physically abnormal and albinos, and the menageries of the Western world, where animals, like fools, were kept for the entertainment of kings. He then notes that the Revolution put an end to the sovereign's dominance over animals.
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According to Ellenberger, the Revolution gave birth to both the asylum and the modern zoological garden. He immediately adds that as the more the mad were concealed from the gaze of the crowds who wanted to humiliate them, thanks to the virtues of confinement, the more animals were exhibited.
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In conclusion, Ellenberger speculates as to the therapeutic effect visiting zoos might have had on the mad. He insists that the insane recover a certain dignity by coming into contact with the gaze of animals. Unlike both the fundamentalists of animal liberation,
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whom he criticizes for their anthropomorphic vision of animals, and those who destroy nature and the animal kingdom, he speaks in utopian terms of a possible return to the
paradeisos
of old.

Rather than exploring the various facets of the interwoven history of the mad, animals and the abnormal, or describing the various ways human being treat animality, as Jacques Derrida and Élisabeth de Fontenay have done, the ethnologists, cognitivists and behaviourists concentrated not just on classifying species and animals' ways of life, but also on their sexuality. The main goal of those who specialized in the study of the great apes was to discover all possible similarities between human and non-human primates. From this post-Darwinian perspective, the point is not to show that men are descended from monkeys, but to elevate monkeys to the status of men.

It was initially argued that the absence of any form of face-to-face copulation in mammals was an indication that their sexuality was organized around bestiality, violence, aggression, dominance – and, why not, enjoyment [
jouissance
] of the other. Face-to-face copulation was therefore seen as specifically human or as the sign of the normality of a human sexuality based upon a necessary recognition of the primacy of the difference between the sexes. It was then deduced that there was no such thing as a female orgasm in the animal kingdom.

Primatologists and specialists on mammals therefore baptized face-to-face copulation as the ‘missionary position' so as to certify that it was bound up with civilization – or rather with the civilizing mission of the Christian West: ‘The frontal copulatory position was elevated to a cultural innovation of great significance, one that fundamentally altered the relationship between men and women. It was felt that pre-literate people would greatly benefit from education about this mode of intercourse, hence the term
missionary position
' (Waal 1998: 101).

While the fact that this position is unknown in the animal kingdom could be seen as one of the major signs that allow us to differentiate between human and animals, the fact that human beings practice
coitus a tergo
had to be interpreted as a survival of animal behaviour. For the moralists, it will be recalled, this style of copulation was an expression of an instinct that was bestial, and therefore demonic or perverse, as the Devil has always been represented as a lecherous beast. For similar reasons, the female orgasm was, from this perspective, described as the expression of a perverse animality.

Darwinian naturalists and evolutionists subsequently argued that the human practice of
coitus a tergo
merely proved that there was a real and absolute continuity between the two species. From that perspective, animals may have some awareness of good and evil: some animals are perverse, and others are not, or are perverse to a greater or lesser degree. The purpose of this hypothesis was to demonstrate that perversion was a natural phenomenon. If male apes copulated with each other, they were inverts. So why could cows not be inverts? The fact that they could suck their own teats meant that there was no reason why they should not be likened to fetishists or masturbators.

For their part, psychoanalysts tended to see face-to-face copulation, which is exclusively human, as a sort of proof of the existence of a pre-Oedipal complex: every man was a son who wanted to fuse with his mother, and every woman was a mother who transformed the man who inseminated her into part of her own body. When men and women copulate in this way, they said in substance, the man is in the position of an infant in its mother's arms, while the woman is a substitute-infant for the man.

The observation of bonobos shattered all these hypotheses. These exceptional apes, which are cousins to the chimpanzees, form a strange society in which both males and females appear to be more drawn to the pleasures of sex and food than conquest and domination. They copulate face-to-face, practice fellatio and masturbation and, more significant still, their sexuality is not directly related to reproduction. Males sometimes have relations with other males, and females with other females. Orgasm, which is experienced by both sexes, gives rise to manifestations of intense pleasure.

The primatologists insist, in a word, that all bonobo activities resemble human activities, or at least appear to do so. Young apes can, for example, look like sulky children and express disappointment if they are deprived of food. When they are having sex, females may cry out in pleasure and they sometimes join in the games of the males, tickling their stomachs or armpits. Of all the apes, it is, in short, the bonobos that most closely resemble human beings in terms of their behaviour.

And yet, be that as it may, it has to be said that, whatever primatologists may claim, no animal sexuality will ever resemble human sexuality for the simple reason that it is devoid of any complex symbolic language, and therefore of any form of self-consciousness.

That is why all observation of animal sexuality simply confirms the researchers' anthropomorphic assumptions or, worse still, leads to a perverse, and completely un-Darwinian, attempt to turn human beings into apes, and apes into human beings. Unless it is perverse, no science will ever prove that there is such a thing as perversion in the animal kingdom. Animals know nothing of the Law or of the transgression of the Law. They are not fetishists, paedophiles, coprophiles, necrophiliacs, criminals, masochists, voyeurs or exhibitions, and they are unable to sublimate. And the fact that some male primates will not copulate with their mothers,
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or seem to prefer another male to a female, does not provide grounds for arguing that the great apes are familiar with either the prohibition of incest or the joys of sodomy.

Similarly, the fact that animals, even when tamed, can be dangerous, aggressive, murderous and cruel does not allow us to deduce that they kill human beings or other animals simply for the pleasure of exterminating them. The cruelty of animals is not related to human cruelty because it is instinctive and can never be likened to some delight in cruelty. As Georges Bataille rightly points out, there is no crime and no eroticism in the animal kingdom: ‘Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death' (Bataille 2006b: 13) … ‘Eroticism is one aspect of the inner life of man … Human choice is … different from that of animals. It appeals to the infinitely complex inner mobility which belongs to man alone. The animal does have a subjective life but this life seems to be conferred upon it like an inert object, once and for all. Human eroticism differs from animal sexuality precisely in this, that it calls inner life into play' (2006b: 29).

There is, then, no eroticism in the animal world: no bodily eroticism, no emotional eroticism, and no sacred eroticism.

Being part of the living world, animals do, on the other hand, inhabit an imaginary world that allows them to express their pain, just as we do. This means that human beings, who are the sole masters of the Law, must include animals in the sphere of law: ‘No animal is capable of inflicting what men inflict on other men, and that is why describing a crime as bestial is a disastrous nonsense. It is highly likely that animals, or at least the animals we are acquainted with, know nothing of the excesses that lead to the extremes of good and evil … No animal subjectivity can recognize the other as a subjectivity that is identical to its own or have any notion of what is meant by the law, which means animal can ever enter into a contract with us' (Fontenay 2004).

Try as we may to train animals to make them behave like human beings and experiment on them to test the effects of certain hormones, electrical current or surgical interventions, we simply have to accept that only humans can be perverse.
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It is, in other words, as a great a mistake to deny that humans are part of the animal kingdom, as do creationists and believers in intelligent design, as it is to attempt to abolish all differences between human being and animals, like the utilitarians of deep ecology or the cognitive behaviourists, who argue that there is an absolute continuity between the animal model and the human model. The former turn man into a divine creature and run the risk that, one day, man will see himself as a god and exterminate all those beings (so-called ‘inferior' men and animals) who are deemed to be divine enough to go on living, while the latter condemn human beings to a sordid determinism that denies them any awareness of their fate, any free will and any ability to tell the difference between good and evil.

It is therefore not surprising that the creationists are so critical of the great figure of Darwin, who demonstrated that men are descended from the apes, or that the behaviourists'
bête noire
should be Freud. Freud is Darwin's heir and describes man as a subject who is decentred but aware of the humiliation that forces him to share his fate with the animals. They are his brothers, but they belong to a different species and he has always both loved and tortured them. Eventually, we will have to accept that there are similarities between the two species and resist all the temptations of an ill-conceived ethology: ‘Man … alone can with certainty be ranked as a moral being … The moral sense perhaps affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals' (Darwin 2004: 135, 151).

While animals are not perverse, some of the theories human beings have dreamed up to explain animality certainly are. We owe the invention of a strange theory of animality that enjoys exceptional popularity all over the world to Peter Singer (1976), an Australian utilitarian philosopher born just after the Second World War, and the founder of the great animal liberation movement. In a book published in 1976 and subsequently translated into many languages, he describes the terrible tortures that Western society, which has been perverted by a scientistic ideal, inflicts upon animals. Monkeys are gassed, irradiated or poisoned simply for the pleasure of giving them ‘stimulation' and are used as guinea pigs in place of human beings. Mice are murdered in laboratories for the sole purpose of testing poisons. Living chickens are hung up by their feet on hooks as they are carried into industrial slaughter houses. Calves are forced to live in cramped boxes to make them anaemic and better to eat. Pregnant sows are kept in stalls where they are tightly tethered by their necks. All these descriptions and images are sickening.
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But, far from simply calling for a legitimate campaign to improve conditions for animals, Singer assimilates them to human beings. And he therefore concludes that the treatment human beings reserve for animals by eating them, and not just torturing them, is the same as the treatment of dominant groups throughout the history of humanity when behaving as racists, colonialists, the organizers of genocides, torturers, fascists, anti-Semites, misogynists, homophobes, and so on.

He then invents the so-called concept of ‘speciesism' to describe the specific form of discrimination that supposedly characterizes the essential relationship between animals and humans, and compares it to racism. ‘Anti-speciesism' is, in his view, therefore equivalent to a liberation movement akin to anti-fascism, anti-colonialism, feminism or anti-racism.

The thesis seems generous, and has seduced many defenders of the animal cause who are exasperated with the inertia of those who control the market for food, experimental science, and expeditions to capture animals of all kinds. If, however, we look at it more closely, we find that it is based upon an inversion of the laws of nature that transforms man, not into a being who is identical to an animal, but into the representative of a species that is inferior, or even sub-animal. And in order to regenerate the human condition, which has been bastardized by its carnivorous instincts, Singer calls for the creation of a new man. ‘Vegetarian man'
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alone can free other men – the filth who eat ham sandwiches
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– from their status as murderers. Singer also believes that eating animals is in itself a criminal act that is as abject as torturing them for pleasure. He thus makes every human carnivore an accomplice to a collective murder that can be likened to a sort of genocide.

The thesis defended by the anti-speciesists is based not only on a kind of hatred of humanity and valorization of a new ‘non-meatist' human species, but also on a perverse attempt to abolish the species barrier.
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Witness, if need be, the way they ‘revise' the definition of humanity. They are not interested in protecting animals from violence and establishing new animal rights, but in granting ‘the non-human great apes' human rights.

This argument is based upon the conviction, which is shared by Singer and his followers, that the great apes, just like humans, have cognitive models that give them access to language and, above all, that they are ‘more human' than humans afflicted with madness, senility or neurological diseases. By tracing a new frontier between the human and the non-human – a frontier that transgresses the classic organization of relations between nature and culture
¹⁹
– animal liberationists in fact expel a whole race of ‘abnormals' who are judged to be inferior or incapable of reason from the human realm: the handicapped, the mad, people with Down's syndrome, patients with Alzheimer's disease, and so on. And in doing so, they privilege the animality of the great apes – which is deemed to be superior to the humanity of abnormal humans – to the detriment of the animal kingdom's other species: mammals, birds and reptiles.
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