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Elizabeth Costello, Embodiment, and the Limits of Rights

Elizabeth Susan Anker

New Literary History, Volume 42, Number 1, Winter 2011, pp. 169-192

(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2011.0009

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New Literary History, 2011, 42: 169192

Elizabeth Costello, Embodiment, andthe Limits of Rights

Elizabeth Susan Anker

Literary criticism and theory have, of late, witnessed an ex-plosion of interest in human rights and what we might call therights paradigm.1 Ours is increasingly a global culture in which

rights discourses often yield an automatic truth status with transnationaland transcultural appeal.2 As the worlds most effective and visiblelanguage for approaching suffering and injustice, human rights andtheir ever-expanding currency have augured a new era of internationalregard for the dignity of the individual person. And in many respects,this worldwide proliferation of respect for human rights represents a

visionary achievement in politics and law.

While our eras thriving investment in human rights is laudable, thelegal-philosophical ideals that accompany dominant, liberal articula-tions of rights are, however, aficted by deep liabilities. Rights are oftencriticized for being exclusionary and premised on gendered, racialized,class-based, and other hierarchies and divisions. They advance assump-tions about what is natural, rendering normative a narrow denitionof what it means to be a fully functioning human being. According tomany theorists, they thus prescribe an ethics of subject formation thatdeauthorizes competing worldviews and cultures that prize antitheti-

cal values.3 Even the most widely cited formulation of rights, the 1948Universal Declaration of Human Rights (the UDHR), can be seento exhibit such a tendency. By construing human rights as a commonstandard of achievement for all peoples, it rhetorically echoes the logicof development, with its neoimperial assumptions about Third Worldinferiority and stasis. While largely a symbolic statement that has sincebeen supplemented by an array of other human rights covenants, theUDHRs language helps illustrate why skeptics have censured rightsdiscourses for ratifying some human faculties at the expense of others.

By enshrining reason, conscience, freedom of speech, equality,and the right to own property, the UDHR might seem to naturalizea strangely anemic and atomistic vision of the human selfone over-ridingly invested in Enlightenment-based, or what this essay will termliberal, expectations about human ourishing and progress.

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new literary history170

In light of the growing preponderance of rights discourses, it is notsurprising that animal welfare advocates have also enlisted the idiomof rightsan idiom that pervades the text of J. M. Coetzees ElizabethCostello.4 Extending a humanist commitment to overcoming suffering,animal rights proponents foreground animals abilities to experiencepain, thereby recalling Jeremy Benthams famous observation: The ques-tion is not, Can they reason? Nor, Can they talk? But can they suffer?5Many justications for animal welfare depart from Benthams emphasison suffering, however, in their efforts to establish the similarity of animalsto humans. Legal and philosophical defenses of the animal typicallytake the status of the human as their starting points, asking whether

animals are sufciently like human beings.

6

Proceeding through thelogic of analogy or comparison, they thus focus on an aspect of humanconsciousnesssuch as the capacity for reason, dignity, or shameandestablish that animals, too, possess that faculty.7 Yet, within this type offramework, animals are entitled to rights only to the degree they resemblethe human, reinforcing the priority of a limited collection of values.

Living under and in the aftermath of South African apartheid, J. M.Coetzee has, throughout his career, reected a sustained commitment tosocial justice and human rights. At the same time, however, Coetzee has

evinced signicant wariness about many of the assumptions that underpinrights as a philosophical construct, and these reservations are brought tobear withinElizabeth Costello.8 Within the text, animal suffering serves notso much to verify the liberal ideals subtending dominant formulationsof human rights or to stage an appeal for greater rights protections foranimals; rather, the ontological status of the animal paradoxically exposesthe ssures and contradictions troubling the basic formula of rights. Theprocess of contemplating animal being discloses to Coetzees protagonistCostello the embodied reality of all existencea reality, importantly,

that is occluded within liberal articulations of rights. Costellos recogni-tion of a shared human-animal predicament of corporeal woundednessprovides an alternate basis for obligation both to animals and to otherhuman beings, offering a competing philosophical ground for theoriz-ing ethics and social justice.

By arguing that the animal represents one instance of a broader focuswithin Coetzees work on the existential freight of embodiment, thisessay charts an interpretive approach that departs from much Coetzeecriticism. Many scholars have employed poststructuralist theory to ana-

lyze his writing, drawing variously upon Derrida, Levinas, and Lacan,among others, to explain the relevance of ethics to his ction and tothe many animals that populate it.9 Indeed, Coetzees absorption with

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171elizabethcostello

the philosophical signicance of animal life has coincided with a recenttheoretical preoccupation with animality, a trend fueled in part by Der-ridas late writings.10 Poststructuralist approaches to the animal typicallydecipher it as a gure of extreme otherness, or, in Derridas words, theabsolute alterity of the neighbor, and thus as quintessentially disclosingthe nature of the ethical demand. Such an analytic has been applied

with frequency by Coetzees commentators to evaluate the function ofhis many animals, leading to the conclusion that their radical othernessmarks rst and foremost the impossible character of ethical responsibility.

In maintaining that these prevalent approaches to Coetzees writingneglect his emphasis on the paradoxes of embodiment, this essay draws

on Maurice Merleau-Pontys phenomenology to develop a prism not onlyfor elucidating Coetzees animals and the extent to which they divulgethe predicament of corporeal woundedness but also for contemplatingthe limits of the liberal logic of rights. This investment in Merleau-Pontysthought participates within a wider theoretical (re)turn to phenomenol-ogy, an emerging orientation within, among other disciplines, literarycriticism, political and legal theory, and anthropology.11 On one level, thisrecent gravitation toward phenomenology represents one permutationof the burgeoning interest in affect, as well as a renewed attention to

objects and the material world. Here we could include work as diverseas Bill Browns thing theory and the more Deleuzian formulationsof affect evident in Brian Massumis scholarship.12 In light of its sheerubiquity, the category of affectwith its inescapable grounding in thecorporealseems to furnish an unusually versatile analytic that may beaccompanied by a diminishing critical precision. That said, the broadappeal of affect and materiality studies is productively symptomatic of agrowing fatigue with purely language-based models for theorizing self-hood and epistemology alike, and thus of a parallel desire to question

strict constructionist models of subjectivity.This impetus to revisit phenomenology has become especially pro-

nounced within postcolonial studies. Here, too, phenomenology seemsto offer an exit from the elds reigning theoretical paradigms, whichhave variously been criticized both for reducing all social relations togovernmental rationalities that invariably emanate from Western institu-tions and for perpetuating the romance of postcolonial migrancy along

with correlative notions such as hybridity and mimicry. In whatever case,critics have increasingly blamed the elds poststructuralist leanings for

producing a blinkered hermeneutic focus, alleging that its predominanttheoretical currents have privileged certain subject positions over oth-ers, with the net effect of eliding the actual, lived terms and conditionsof postcolonial existence. In contrast, renewed attention to embodied,

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affective registers of experience have, for theorists including AchilleMbembe, Sara Ahmed, and Leela Gandhi, seemed to purvey an escapefrom the elds theoretical stalemate.13 Not coincidentally in relation to

Elizabeth Costello, this appeal to affect and embodiment has frequentlysupplied a rejoinder to the secular premise underwriting much liberalpolitical thought, including dominant understandings of rights, a focusthat is further evident in the scholarship of Saba Mahmood, Talal Asad,and Charles Hirschkind.14

A phenomenology of embodiment derived from Merleau-Pontysthought can, as such, help to illuminate and surmount certain oversights

within poststructuralist accounts of social justice and human rights.

Poststructuralist thought has, summarily speaking, offered two primaryavenues for evaluating the construct of rights. On the one hand, theoristsinuenced by Foucault have demonstrated how rights discourses andstandards mandate a normative, disciplinary process of subject formation.Likewise, Marxist critics have commonly dismissed rights for collaborat-ing with global capital and legitimizing its proprietary logic.15 On theother hand, deconstructive accounts of ethics have tended to embracea certain utopian vision of human rights, inscribing their promise

within a language of potentiality that casts them as partner to an inde-

nitely forestalled justice, or in Derridas words a democracy to come.Merged into the larger project of a messianically deferred ethics, humanrights claims become merely one guise of the innite demand posedby the radical other,16 of which the animal represents a paradigmaticinstance.

It goes without saying that the foregoing theoretical methodologieshave conducted invaluable work in exposing the hazards of the globaliza-tion of human rights, whether by pointing to the constitutive disjunctionbetween ethics and law or showing how human rights collude with the cir-

cuits of neoimperial hegemony. This essay both protracts and interveneswithin such diagnoses, while also acknowledging that the discourses ofhuman rights are proliferating and increasingly varied. Given that ofciallegal as well as rhetorical statements of human rights have become somanifold as to sometimes untether their philosophical meanings fromtheir Enlightenment-based and other intellectual origins, it would beerroneous to speak of rights discourses as either strictly Eurocentric ormonolithic. Nevertheless, this essay primarily engages what I refer toas liberal understandings of rights to ag the extent to which rights

discourses continue to marshal the ction of the reasoning, dignied,and autonomous individual, thus conrming a vision of the subject asalways already in full possession of corporeal integrity.

Even while it mobilizes conventional critiques of rights,Elizabeth Costellodirects us toward a very different casualty of the liberal architecture of

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rights than poststructuralist theorynamely, to a consideration of howrights logic paradoxically denies the ontological condition of embodi-ment. As such, this essay submits that Coetzee, rather than presentingus with the animals radical alterity, seeks to adumbrate the contoursof what we might term a phenomenological consciousness of sharedembodiment. For his protagonist Costello, the embodied woundednessof the animal not only reveals the pitfalls of both Cartesian dualism andthe emphasis on reason that informs liberal iterations of rights, but italso divulges the interrelatedness and solidarity of all beings, presentingher with a means of rethinking the sociopolitical bond without referenceto political theorys standard calculations. Because such an awareness

of embodiment appears incoherent from the perspective of rationalself-determination, Costello struggles to nd alternate registers of com-munication through which to convey her evolving insights.In turn, inplace of liberalisms conventional grammar of individualistic entitlementsand rights, Costello looks to both literature and a theological languageof belief as she strives to articulate her phenomenologically inectedconception of just coexistence.

The Liabilities of Reason and Rights

Elizabeth Costellois a deeply confounding and even unnerving text thathas inspired substantial scholarly contention. Much of this contentionhas surrounded Costello herself, an often frustrating protagonist whois perpetually alienated from others by her eccentricity, leading somecritics to question her sanity.17 Determining the appropriate genre ofthe text has also engendered signicant academic debate. ElizabethCostellois composed of only marginally related vignettes that are closer

to short stories than cohesive chapters in a novel, and a number of thetexts episodes were originally delivered by Coetzee as public lectures.For instance, the two most widely discussed sections of the text wererst presented as the Princeton Tanner Lectures on Human Values inOctober 1997 and subsequently published in the volume The Lives ofAnimals, followed by extended philosophical commentary.18 Moreover,the narrative ofElizabeth Costellorecounts Costellos ctional delivery ofparallel academic lectures also on the topic of animal welfare, a devicethat has spawned heated controversy over whether Costellos polemical

politics can be read as proxies for Coetzees views.19 Indeed, despitetheir different genders, Coetzee endows his protagonist Costello withattributes that conspicuously identify her as a type of alter ego. Beyondtheir phonetically similar surnames, the Biblical Elizabeth is the motherof John the Baptist. Even more, Costello, like Coetzee, is a famous au-

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thor renowned for rewriting a key work of the Western canon. WhereasCoetzeesFoereturns to Daniel DeFoes Robinson Crusoe, Costello is famedfor her feminist retelling of James Joyces Ulyssesfrom the perspectiveof Molly Bloom.

It may be a source of even greater perplexity that, while the cover ofElizabeth Costelloasserts its status as Fiction, its content, much like Coe-tzees subsequentDiary of a Bad Year(2007), is closer to philosophy, raisingthe question of whether Coetzee masquerades as a philosopher through-out its various episodes. Much of the philosophical argumentation thatCostello undertakes, however, can be seen as bad philosophyriddled

with hyperbole, false analogies, and incoherence, and these apparent

missteps in Costellos logic have only compelled some of Coetzees crit-ics to wonder whether his intention in the volume was not, ironically,to demonstrate philosophys shortcomings. Indeed, as this essay argues,through the philosophical errors of his ctional counterpart, Coetzeestages an implicit plea for the superior merits of poetry, in particular itsability to manifest the caliber of human and animal corporeal being.20

All in all, this ambiguity aboutElizabeth Costellos status as philosophy orction has helped contribute to its near cult status among literary criticsand some philosophers.

The primary theme of Coetzees doubly embedded lectures-within-lectures is the politics of animal liberation, and by far the most widelyanalyzed portion ofElizabeth Costellowas rst presented by Coetzee as aTanner Lecture, an episode wherein Costello also delivers an academictalk. Costello opens this now notorious talk by instructing her audi-ence that she will address the subject of animals and the unspeakablehorrors of their mistreatment (63). However, she explicitly does notframe her appeals to animal welfare through the language of rights,a telling omission that, as we will see, indirectly censures their enabling

logic. After introducing her topic, she continues by equating the Ho-locaust with the contemporary slaughter of animals (6465), althoughshe promptly concedes that in advancing this comparison she makes acheap point (66). What is Costello/Coetzee doing in this controversialand much-cited rant? Through this problematic equivalence, Costelloincites outrage in order to show the risks of a certain breed of reason:analogical comparison, or the expectation of sameness and likenessthrough which animal rights advocacy typically proceeds. She again warnslater in the same lecture against the implications of analogy when she

asserts: The question to ask should not be: Do we have something incommonreason, self-consciousness, a soulwith other animals (79).

Beyond revealing the potentially capricious nature of analogy, Costel-los almost offensive digression about the Holocaust attests to the dangers

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of the abstract (63). Costello repeatedly decries how practical reasonand its analytic tools have warranted the mistreatment of other beings.In doing so, she correlates and cautions against three idealsreason,abstraction, and speecheach of which is intrinsic to, and conspires tosupport, the broad philosophical architecture of liberal constructions ofrights. First, she accuses the Western philosophical tradition, going backto Plato and Descartes, of having erected a dichotomy between subjectand object that relegates animals, lacking reason, to the category ofthe thinglike, or to being mere objects of possession (67). Later, sheraises the inverse question of whether apes on the point of giving uptheir silence . . . should then be afforded human rights, or humanoid

rights (70). Costellos complaints draw attention to the two main justi-cations for historically denying political rights, and by extension legalprotections, to different populationsnamely, that they lack eitherreason or literate speech. But Costello does more than voice familiaranxieties about the tyranny of instrumental reason and the exclusionarystructure of rights. Rather, she additionally condemns the misguidedlogic driving the animal rights movement, showing how it inadvertentlyreinscribes the priority of the human in its very defense of the capacityof animals for humanlike interaction.

To further illustrate her concerns about the conjoined liabilities ofreason and rights, Costello offers an extended reinterpretation of FranzKafkas A Report to an Academy, about the civilized ape Red Peter

who gives a lecture to a learned society (18). Costello historicizes Kafkasparable with reference to contemporaneous behavioral experiments thenbeing conducted on primates by the psychologist Wolfgang Khler,21 andthese examples further demonstrate for Costello the casualties of the corepresumptions underpinning liberal rights discourses. While the experi-ments inducting apes into rational thought are intended to humanize

them (72), in the case of Red Peter they divert him awayfrom ethics andmetaphysics towards the humbler reaches of practical reason, drawingout his selsh appetites rather than his ethical sensibilities, the latterof which Costello importantly suggests to be corporeal (7374). As such,reason ironically functions as a vehicle for a type ofdispossession, whilealso conscripting Red Peter into the pursuit of mastery, with all the

words insidious connotations of enslavement, colonization, and otherforms of domination. His lecture is ultimately cast as an exercise innormalizationa test too, an examination, a viva vocethat initiates

him into the antagonistically possessive behavior encouraged by liberaldiscourses of rights (18).

Even as Costello indicts reason, she similarly, though more subtly,forswears the concept of rights. In a particularly revealing passage, when

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she raises the possibility of humanoid rights for Red Peter, she rejectssuch an option: That is not what Red Peter was striving for when he

wrote, through his amanuensis, Franz Kafka, [his] life history (70).Having already afliated her own predicament as a lecturer with RedPeters, Costello thereby implies that rights are similarly not on heragenda and that another approach to justice might better accommodateanimal (and human) welfare. And yet, despite this and other disavowals,Costello is consistently labeled a rights advocate by different characters,much as she has been by many of Coetzees critics.22 Even her son Johnerroneously reads her agenda as animal rights (61), or the wholeanimal-rights business (100).

Ironically, it is Costellos resort to philosophy in place of literature, herown mtier, that obscures her intellectual commitments. Following herlecture on animal welfare, she faces a staged debate the following day

with the ctional philosopher Professor OHearne. Initiating the de-bate, OHearne states that he has reservations about the animal-rightsmovement, here again reducing Costellos stance to one of conventionalanimal rights advocacy. He levies three fairly predictable objections torights, each underscoring the violence of the liberal rights paradigm.OHearne variously charges that rights are merely a contemporary guise

of cultural imperialism; that their emphasis on language and reasonrenders them exclusionary; and that animals do not comprehend deathas humans do (1059). Finally, he concludes by complaining that rightsare so abstract as to be unconvincing and idle (110). Overall, whileOHearne believes that he rebuts Costellos views, we should note thathis complaints merely echo criticisms of rights logic already venturedby Costello herself, which is to say that his reservations are not off themark. Quite the contrary, his main divergence from Costello lies in themode of argumentation that he resorts to; OHearne relies heavily on

reason and analogy, thus inadvertently conrming the rights paradigmeven as he negates it, and leaving him unable to imagine an alternateframework for opposing animals mistreatment.

Yet of greatest interest in the Costello-OHearne debate are not hisobjections but the fact that Costellos responses eschew the logic of rightsentirely. Instead of utilizing the analogical reasoning germane to rights,she begins by endorsing kindness to animals, dened in its full sense,as an acceptance that we are all of one kind, one nature (106). Next,

when OHearne cites animals decient intelligence, Costello refuses

even to respond, explaining that she would rst want to interrogate thewhole question of rights and how we come to possess them, therebyhighlighting the antagonistic individualism that rights discourses oftenfunction to ratify (107). Finally, in the debates concluding statement,

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Moreover, this corporeal woundedness is heralded by Costello as theessence of what she and Red Peter share in kind, meaning that itboth indexes the porous nature of embodied selfhood and furnishes atype of ethical solidarity. While Costello insists that her embodiment isgenerative of all her philosophical reectionswith the phrase touchon underscoring the visceral ber of its inuenceshe despairs of howreasoned speech and deliberation cover up, or censor, the recognitionsemanating from those embodied registers of experience, rendering thema mark of shame that reason must subordinate.

With this image, Costello additionally refuses to translate the sheercorporeality of Red Peters being or her own into the standards and

norms that govern the expectations about autonomous, self-possessingpersonhood sustaining dominant articulations of rights. Throughouther lecture, she also jettisons philosophys goals of discerning universalmaxims that regulate existence. Rebuking a questioner who asks her toenunciate principles, Costello responds: If principles are what you wantto take away from this talk, I would have to respond, open your heartand listen to what your heart says (82). For Costello, an alternative torights must not occasion another analytic abstraction that would eitherocclude the contingent vulnerability of embodiment or erect another

subject-object divide, with all its implications for the species hierarchyas well as other forms of sociopolitical oppression. So, in place of theCartesian cogito, Costello invokes the heart, which she celebrates asan embodied and therefore more egalitarianalthough potentially alsomore variablemodality of engagement.

In rejecting reasoned argument, Costello not only renounces rightslogic as a basis for defending animal welfare; she additionally disavowsthe axioms of rational deliberation that support conventional denitionsof the secular-democratic public sphere, in particular the presumption

that it is composed of disinterested actors capable of self-abstraction.23However, this refusal leaves her in something of an ontological anddiscursive vacuum. Because the idiom of rights offers her neither aphilosophical safeguard for animal life nor the imaginative resourcesthat would allow her to fully inhabit her own being, she nds herselfon uncharted terrain. Seemingly in an attempt to convey the ontologi-cal freight of dimensions of experience not wholly preadjudicated bypower or discourse, Costello appeals instead to a phenomenologicalunderstanding of existence and a descriptive arsenal better gauged to

elucidate such awareness. Her language of embodiment thus gesturestoward an alternate conceptualization of species interrelationality, onethat surmounts the mutually imbricated liabilities of liberal reason andrights, even though she faces an impasse in her efforts to negotiate suchan alternative.

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In place of reasoned intellection and liberalisms constricted explana-tory archive, Costello describes each living being as constituted by anembodied soul (78), which she further elaborates in terms of embed-dedness (32). She explains why animals manifest embodiment: becausetheir whole being is in the living esh (110), they cannot sublate thisreality by retreating into reason. Red Peter, for instance, is embeddedin life, a condition Costello further explains in terms of how we areembedded, you in me, I in you (32), and this vision of mutual inter-twining dispels not only mind-body dualism but also the objectifyingself-other binary. Since for Costello practical reason underwrites theegoism encouraged by rights, escaping its strictures allows the symbi-

otic, interdependent character of life to emerge. Moreover, because aconsciousness of embodiment displaces the cogito, or the disengagedpurity of abstract ideas, Costello invokes embodiment to refute theauthority of rational thought. As she urges her audience: To thinking,cogitation, I oppose fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of beingnot a consciousness of yourself as a kind of ghostly reasoning machinethinking thoughts, but on the contrary the sensationa heavily affec-tive sensationof being a body with limbs that have extension in space,of being alive to the world (78). Her repudiation of decorporealized

reason, as such, is counterpart to a pervasive sense of the porous unityof all matter, although that perception of solidarity also estranges herfrom propositional speech and thus resists being distilled into universal-izing principles or laws.

Merleau-Pontys thought can here help to delineate Costellos visionof the (human) animal, as well as her attempts to redress the liabili-ties of the liberal rights paradigm. Much like Costello in her lectures,Merleau-Pontys philosophy dissolves a Cartesian mind-body dualism bylinking reason and speech to the embodied subject. In his Course Notes

onNature, he explains that the Cartesian cogito is derived through amethod of purication that undoes the unreected communion withthe World by striving to discern objective reality and to reduce it to

what it can signify when we think it clearly and distinctly.24 In place ofdisinterested thought, Merleau-Ponty argues, we must pursue a directand primitive contact with the world through our foremost status ascorporeal beings.25 This phenomenological consciousness, moreover,does not engender clarity or cognizable trutha set of facts capableof being reduced to othersbut exposes the world as strange and

paradoxical, as mysterious and not amenable to elucidation.26 Aswe grasp humanity rst as just another manner of being a body,27 weencounter the reciprocal insertion and intertwining of the body inthe world, a recognition that discloses the reality of interbeing, or ourbodys coupling with the esh of the world.28 Embodiment does not

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isolate us from others, but instead the mental life of others becomes animmediate object, a whole charged with immanent meaning.29 Such aconception of intersubjectivity represents an alternative to a poststruc-turalist brand of ethics in its refusal of the explanatory prism of absoluteotherness and its acknowledgment of prelinguistic, self-present types ofmeaning, although they remain eeting and paradoxical. Along suchlines, embodiment gives rise to a species of unity [that] is not a mat-ter of subsumption under a law,30 meaning that it thwarts containment

within the principles that Costello also revolts against.However, the task of dispensing with reason and laws is not a fac-

ile or reassuring one for Costello; rather, it demands that she grapple

with unwelcome and alienating complexity (108). Despite its role indisclosing her connection to the larger world, she experiences her ownembodiment as a wound. Importantly, this condition of chronic vul-nerability gives rise to a logical contradiction that is brought into highrelief through the reality of human nitude, which Costello reckons

with in her lecture contained in the (rst) The Lives of Animalsepisode:

All of us have such moments, particularly as we grow older. The knowledgewe have is not abstractAll human beings are mortal, I am a human being,

therefore I am mortalbut embodied. For a moment we arethat knowledge.We live the impossible: we live beyond our death, look back on it, yet look backas only a dead self can.

When I know, with this knowledge, that I am going to die, what is it . . . thatI know? Do I know what it is like for me to be a corpse or do I know what itis like for a corpse to be a corpse? The distinction seems to me trivial. WhatI know is what a corpse cannot know: that it is extinct, that it knows nothingand will never know anything more. For an instant, before my whole structureof knowledge collapses in panic, I am alive inside that contradiction, dead andalive at the same time. (77)

In other words, the paradox of embodiment emerges for Costello inher own experiential thralldom to the tangibly precarious rhythms ofmortality, in the midst of actively awaiting her own death. Such an intel-lectually unfathomable exercise dees rational certitude, at the sametime as it gives the lie to liberalisms myth of the dignied individualin possession of bodily integrity. As such, Costello dismisses analyticreasons approach to this conundrum as trivial, asserting that it canonly be viscerally inhabited through the imagination.

Costellos meditations here again resemble Merleau-Pontys account ofwhy an embodied consciousness is premised on paradox. Merleau-Pontydescribes the effort to fathom both the separation and the union of thesoul and the body as insurmountable; however, he simultaneously main-

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tains that this contradiction is constitutive of the human.31 Predicatedon a sustained incoherencewhich is to say that philosophical expatia-tion and analysis will only deepen such a paradoxour embodimentsimultaneously subverts customary assumptions about rational knowledgeand contests the ction of the self-determining, autonomous self. Tosuch an end, it countermands reasons sovereignty and instead elicitsa posture of extreme humility, one emanating from our intertwining

with and dependence on the parallel vulnerability of other beings.Nevertheless, we must note that these recognitions rest much less

comfortably in Elizabeth Costellos narrative than in Merleau-Pontysthought. While we might expect a perception of interbeing to incur

a sense of increased interpersonal mutuality, Costello nds her realiza-tions profoundly alienatinga source, if anything, of anxiety and dis-cord. Although Costello tries passionately to convince her audiences ofher commitments, Coetzee recurrently dramatizes her lack of success,almost condemning her to the fringes of madness and insanity. Perhapsthis is why so many critics have interpreted theElizabeth Costelloepisodesas cautionary fables, taking her earnestness to illustrate the pitfalls ofphilosophical analysis. Costello ostracizes her audiences, even her fam-ily resents her obsession with animal welfare, and she herself surmises

that her views might be nonsensical. If we as readers are complicit withthe myopia of her ctional audiences, we might, then, conclude thatCoetzee sets out to indict us, too, for a parallel failure of imagination.However, even Costello experiences a lapse in resolve, and this essay willconclude by probing that very failure. After relentlessly defending her

vegetarianism for days on end, Costello confronts an impasse when itcomes to translating her phenomenological awareness into persuasivespeech, as she confesses to her son John: When I think of the words,they seem so outrageous that they are best spoken into a pillow or into

a hole in the ground (114).

Humanity

Such an impasse is also revealed through Costellos recurrent xationon the attributes of humanity, or those qualities that set humans apartfrom animals, and her reections on humanity open up contradic-tions that equally infect her account of ethics. Namely, she asserts that

an embodied consciousness is induced by encounters with animals andthat it pregures an ethical comportment toward life; however, at thesame time, such ethical acts testify to a condition of humanity that isunavailable to animals. Taken as a whole, Costellos views may thus seem

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to culminate in an almost incoherent breed of humanism. On the onehand, her celebration of corporeality and critiques of reason and rightsquestion the rationalist orientation of what this essay characterizes asthe liberal undercurrents of the European humanist tradition. But onthe other, Costellos preoccupation with animal welfare is inextricablygrounded in different humanist yearnings and ideals that, instead, oper-ate without foremost reference to reason. As such, Costellos philosophiz-ing prompts troubling questions about whether any given formulation ofethical responsibility will ultimately remain human-centered, even whileit may relinquish the liberal-rationalist dispensation of much democraticpolitical theory.

Tied to the paradox of embodiment, Costellos central example ofhumanity concerns the decaying, time-ridden elements of corporeality.In an episode titled The Humanities in Africa, Costello travels to Africato visit her sister Blanche, a Catholic nun administering a missionaryhospital in rural Zululand, and the sisters engage in an extended dis-agreement over whether the Christian or Greek version of humanism bestenables human ourishing. Ultimately, their conict boils down to thedifferent images of corporeal existence offered by these two traditions.Blanche lauds the Christian vision of embodied brokenness, arguing

that the suffering Christ provides something material and concrete forpeople to touchput their hand into the side of, feel the wound, smellthe blood (145). Costello at rst revolts against what she characterizesas the backward, indecent, squalid nature of the crucixion (139),instead preferring Greek thought because of what she describes as itsreverence for living beauty (138).

After returning home, however, a distant memory compels Costello torethink her position. She recalls how years ago she used to visit an ailing,elderly man, a painter by hobby, who was her mothers friend in the rest

home. After he lost his voice, Costello became his model and providedhim with company. One day, when his painting was not working, sheresponded by offering inspiration, baring her breasts and performingfellatio on his nearly extinct organ of generation (154). Looking backon this incident, Costello realizes that these actions could not possiblycomport with the idealism of the Greeks and that only the Christianrendering of humanism and its emphasis on corporeal vulnerabilitymight elucidate the ethical merit of her gesture. Concluding that botheros and agape would obscure her actions afnity to the grotesque,

Costello asserts the indispensability of Christian caritasfor grasping howhumanity might centrally reside within the most humbling aspects ofembodiment.

Costellos xation on the meaning of the word humanity also inu-ences her complicated views about animals. While she argues for their

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humane treatment, Costello maintains that the mindset underlying actsof humanity is inaccessible to the very animals at whom these acts aredirected. In this way, she makes a point of analytically distinguishingethical human behavior from animal being. She here evokes the VirginMary to explain the descriptive purchase ofcaritas: We perform acts ofhumanity. Acts like that are not available to animals, who cannot uncoverthemselves because they do not cover themselves. Nothing compels usto do it, Mary or me. But out of the overow, the outow of our humanhearts we do it nevertheless: drop our robes, reveal ourselves, reveal thelife and beauty we are blessed with (150). Much as within Merleau-Pontys thought, humanity, for Costello, ensues from an irrational

afrmation of her embodiment that is motivated not by thought but thevisceral intuitions of the heart. Here again, she appeals to a metaphorof self-covering as an apparent gure for language, which must tempo-rarily cede to the constitutive woundednessas well as the beautyofthe body. Nonetheless, Costello seemingly wants to have it both ways.Her conception of humanity is potentially problematic in endorsingnotions of relative dignity and shamewe see here the reappearance ofa mode of reasoning based on analogies between humans and animalsthat, I have argued, the narrative elsewhere calls into question. Hence,

despite her pleas on behalf of animals, by withholding from them thepropensity for humane or ethical action, Costello seemingly underminesher own apparent values.

Not only does Costellos framework exclude animals from the purviewof humanity, but she also consigns animal life to a position of affectiveand imaginative impoverishment. As this essays concluding sectionconsiders, Costello afrms poetrys unique potential to capture thetexture of both animal being and human embodiment, adumbratingthe bearings of such an embodied consciousness on ethical conduct.

Nevertheless, Costello also maintains that animals lack the capacity toappreciate art, thus treating poetry as caught up in a unilateral circuit ofexchange, or as fall[ing] within an entirely human economy in which theanimal has no share (96). Such an explanatory framework bars animalsfrom either performing or understanding ethics, insofar as they cannotundergo the sorts of illumination cultivated by poetry. Ironically, then,Costello extols an awareness of embodiment as something humans canlearn from animals through imaginative and experiential immersion inour shared corporeal predicament, while also refusing animals access

to the symbolic avenues through which we humans cognitively occupytheir embodied condition. And in doing so, she appears to reinscribethe very human-animal divide that a phenomenology such as Merleau-Pontys sets out to dismantle.

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Of Art and Belief

So, at this point we must ask: can we reconcile Costellos myriad philo-sophical positions? Are her views hopelessly muddled? Or is it preciselytheir ostensible confusion that lends them value, reecting the sameproductive antagonisms that have spawned the multiplying scholarship onCoetzees text? Likewise, how do we account forElizabeth Costellos genreand form? Does it qualify as ction (as its title proclaims), philosophy, orsome vexing hybrid of the two? This essays concluding section proposesthat the very ambiguity and even discomfort inspired by Costellos intel-lectual meanderings, along with the texts unnervingly disjointed form,

are what render it instructive for charting the dilemmas involved in herattempts to craft a phenomenological supplement to liberal discoursesof rights. The very disunity of her ramblings mirrors the obstacles sheencounters in her efforts to translate embodiment into not only delib-erative speech but also a just and accommodating ethical framework.That said, Costello repudiates reason not in a vacuum but in favor ofboth art and a rhetoric of belief, modes of expression better gauged tothe texture of embodiment and its irreducible contradictions. Similarly,Coetzees decision in the Tanner Lectures to present an academic talk

in the form of a narrative suggests that literature is especially well-poisedto transcend the dualistic rift between the I think and the I am atthe crux of the Cartesian intellectual heritage. In the end, therefore,the many aporias that necessarily and generatively afict Costellos viewsare what require the imaginative terrain of narrative literature.

In place of rational deliberation, Costello invokes two different imagi-native, affective discourses of experiential engagement in her effort todivulge the contours of an embodied consciousness. The rst is poetry.It has become virtually axiomatic within posthumanist thought to insist

on the value of poetic or artistic modes of communication in bridgingthe species divide.32 In his discussion of Coetzee, for instance, Derek

Attridge draws on a Derridean ethics to discover the strangeness, mys-tery, or unfathomability [that] is involved in every encounter with theliterary.33 Poetry fullls a very different function for Costello, however,than encountering Derridean otherness. Rather, she extols poetry formaking embodiment manifest, while still preserving the fundamen-tally enigmatic character of corporeal being. Teaching a master class,Costello employs Ted Hughess poems to demonstrate that we too can

embody animalsby the process called poetic invention that minglesbreath and sense in a way that no one has explained and no one ever

will (9798). Costello presses her listeners: If I do not convince you,that is because my words, here, lack the power to bring home to you

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the wholeness, the unabstracted, unintellectual nature, of that animalbeing. That is why I urge you to read the poets who return the living,electric being to language, and if the poets do not move you, I urge

you to walk, ank to ank, beside the beast that is prodded down thechute to his executioner (111). Prioritizing visceral over cerebral accessto experience, Costello contends that artistic encounters with animalityalso promise to revitalize language. The thinking of embodiment, then,

yields vast consequences; namely, Costello submits that an embodiedconsciousness can enliven and amplify our imaginative reserves, as wellas our corresponding range of linguistic symbolizations. Costello thusinverts the negative associations of animality, suggesting that, rather

than being yoked to silence and speechlessness, corporeal being canreinvigorate expression. In turn, poetry offers a type of remedy for theliabilities of reason, rejuvenating the fabric of affective perception thatreason otherwise enfeebles. Accordingly, Costello implicitly challengesany privileging of writing and textuality, asserting instead the bodysindispensable inuence on ethical action and lending it a certain pre-cedence over language.

While poetry thus reveals the experiential fabric of corporeal being,Costello nds herself faced with the difcult task of transposing her

insights into propositional form, leading her to concede that she hasno choice but to subject [her] discourse to reason, despite its distor-tion of her underlying claims (68). Through this double bind, Costelloconfronts the barriers to transforming a phenomenological approachto justice into the conventions of deliberative, persuasive speech. Sincethe ontological freight of embodiment inheres within the paradoxes ofcorporeal existence, its disclosure seems to demand a language itselfreplete with contradiction. In one instance, we have seen how poetrypermits and even prolongs such a species of paradox that rationalistic

thought would otherwise discipline and suppress. But, beyond poetry,the primary idiom that Costello adopts in effort to explain embodimentcarries conspicuously theological overtones.

Urged to defend her vegetarianism, Costello explicitly repudiates theassumption that it extends from moral conviction (88). However, shesimultaneously asserts that her conduct comes out of a desire to save mysoul (89), thereby relying on a seemingly nebulous distinction betweenmorality and soul saving. Along similar lines, the other language through

which Costello defends animal welfare is that of belief. This rhetoric

in particular comes to the fore in the texts nal episode, At the Gate,in which Costello nds herself in a Kafka-esque purgatory where shemust stand trial before judges who insist that she confess her beliefs.In their questioning, they construe the aptitude for belief as what con-

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stitutes the human and separates humanity from sheer corporeality,in a striking parallel to Costellos own denial of humanity to animals.Costello initially tries to evade their demands by asserting that her taskas a writer requires holding opinions and prejudices at bay. However,she is informed, rst, We all believe. We are not cattle (194). Andlater her judges again chide her, Without beliefs we are not human(200). Costello, for some time, balks at this notion and counters thatour hearts also serve as ethical supports (203), once again afrmingthe merit of corporeal ways of knowing. She also considers respondingin the form of a question: I believe that I am? I believe that what standsbefore you today is I? (21011) Through her rejoinder exploding the I

think, therefore I am of the Cartesian cogito, Costello postulates theprimacy not of thought but of belief, and not of intellection but of theself-present authority of her own corporeal being.

Musing over this rst unsuccessful hearing, Costello turns for insightto an episode from The Odyssey, which eventually induces something ofan epiphany. Like her revelation aboutcaritas, it too involves the nexusbetween the attempt to intellectually grasp the eventuality of death andan afrmative consciousness of embodiment. In the passage at hand,Odysseus, at the behest of Tiresias, must sacrice his ram. Costello

contemplates not Odysseuss arduous decision, however, but instead therams death throes, and this imaginative exercise incurs a heightenedlucidity.The ram, she thinks, is not just an idea, the ram is alive thoughright now it is dying (211). Conjuring up a graphic image of its bloodand entrails, she refuses to dissociate herself from its death via an idea,or philosophical abstraction, and concludes, For that, nally, is all itmeans to be alive: to be able to die (211). Paradoxically, this reckoning

with death forces Costello into a realization of her formerly submerged,life-celebrating beliefs. In her next petition to the court, she narrates

a childhood memory of small frogs living in a river near her home inrural Australia and recalls how, after a torrential rain, the frogs wouldcome to life: At night you would hear the belling of tens of thousandsof little frogs rejoicing in the largesse of the heavens (216). Costellointerprets their relevance for the judgesWhat do I believe? I believein those little frogs . . . It is because of their indifference to me that Ibelieve in them (217). After some prodding, Costello even formulatesa principle for them: I believe in what does not bother to believe inme (218).

On one level, then, while Costello offers up a proposition, it is decid-edly nonuniversal and contingent. But of greatest importance, Costellosbelief in the animal gains its merit in being unrequited, meaning thatit thwarts the expectations about parity and proportionality according

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to which liberal political thought usually measures social justice. Itvalorizes relations that are imbalanced and cannot be ameliorated byany redistribution of entitlements, whether through the reallocation ofresources or greater protection of individual rights. We might say that itis this asymmetry of the social bond that mandates Costellos equally jar-ring rhetoric. Precisely because Costellos belief is incommensurate withaccepted political models and discourses for theorizing human-animalcoexistence, she has no choice but to induct a new (or, perhaps, withits theological underpinnings, old) set of terms for fashioning such anaccord.

Nonetheless, we must still ask some difcult questions about Costellos

belief: so as long as an individualistic, rights-based framework fornegotiating social justice remains our primary point of reference, isa discourse of faith akin to Costellos doomed to appear, despite itsappeal, little more than muddled and incoherent? Or does it point tothe foreclosures that sustain liberal democracys fundamentally seculartenets? And might it thereby trace the contours of a breed of socialitypremised on responsibility instead of rights? Is the unease that Costelloinspires in the reader a byproduct of our legitimate frustration with hermeanderings, or does it serve to index the impediments faced in her

attempt to reconcile a phenomenology of embodiment with broaderprinciples that might found a social order? As a consequence, doesElizabeth Costelloilluminate the limitations of an account of social justicethat is based on what Merleau-Ponty calls the esh of the world,34 atthe same time as Coetzees text makes a powerful plea for the compel-ling nature of such a vision?

Merleau-Ponty is again instructive in elaborating the nature of suchan impasse. In his Course Notes onNature, Merleau-Ponty proposes therelevance of a concept of the divine for coming to terms with the incon-

gruities of embodied thought: It is not by thinking according to humanbeing, but according to God that we can solidly think the elements of

which human being is made. The incomprehensibility of God, which isnowise his unknowability and even less his irrationality, but the formalreason of the innite, is indispensable for allowing us to resolve preciselythe problem of the ground of truth and the limits of our intelligence.Between these two perspectives, God is incomprehensible.35 For Merleau-Ponty, religious rhetoric dramatizes the constraints of human intelligenceeven as those constraints constitute the very essence of the human. To

be alivefor both Merleau-Ponty and Costellois a paradox, and theonly way to inhabit such a paradox is through an almost Kierkegaardianleap, wherein realities that reasoned intellection would deem mad orimpossible become articles of faith.36

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As for Merleau-Ponty, Costellos faith-based rhetoric grasps at quasi-theological insights, which she repeatedly conveys through a Judeo-Christian iconography. As we have seen, Costello regards the VirginMary as the apotheosis ofcaritas, the ethical comportment of humanity.On the one hand, by thus embedding her ethical commitments withina religious worldview, Costello is able to preserve their nonrational, af-fectively charged qualities. On the other hand, by drawing on such afamiliar repertoire of religious images, she risks domesticating belief,subsuming it within a habitual symbolic economy. Nevertheless, this ten-sion between the paradoxical and mundane attributes of belief mirrorsthe contradictions inherent to the condition of embodiment, and in

this respect Costellos disconcerting language marks both the difcultyand the necessity of incorporating such intensely inhabited yet counter-rational commitments into political thought. That is, while Costellosgrammar of belief exemplies the type of discourse that might valuablydisabuse the liberal-democratic public sphere of the myth that reasoneddeliberation alone grants political decision making legitimacy, her failuresalso point to the impasses that confront such a project. Costello is will-ing to avow the multiple, amorphous, and unveriable underpinningsof her existential faith with a candidness and sincerity that is deeply

disquieting, especially to Coetzees largely academic audiences. Andprecisely the extent to which she unsettles us gauges the urgency of thequestions that she provokes.

To such an end, Coetzee does depict Costello as aware of just howtenuous her edice of belief is, whether or not we buy into either herreligious inclinations or what some might term her postsecular poli-tics. For at the narratives conclusion, Costello imagines herself alloweda glimpse beyond the purgatorial gate, and what she sees is a dog, anold dog, his lion-coloured hide scarred from innumerable manglings

(224). While the text here suggests a connection between the animaland the divine, Costello remains ambivalent about this vision, thinkingshe does not trust it, does not trust in particular the anagram GOD-DOG (225). When all is said and done, even Costello recoils against thefull implications of her desire to celebrate an embodied consciousnessas a sufcient guide for ethical action. While she appeals to corporealexperience as a corrective to the rationalistic bias of rights logic as wellas the many hierarchies that it consolidates, her anxiety also indexesproductive limits to the heuristic of embodiment. Despite her language

of faith, she refuses herself to trust the radical equalization that mightseem to ensue from her ontology. In turn, while a focus on embodimentis a valuable check on certain corrosive tendencies of overly abstract orinstrumental brands of reason, Costellos own skepticism exposes the

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dangers of invoking embodiment as an independent leveling principle,displaying how it might erase critical distinctions, here between theanimal and the divine.

Costellos cognizance of her failure as a philosopher brings us backto the question of whether her views are ultimately persuasive. AlthoughCostellos idiom of belief alludes to a necessary kind of language,Coetzee leaves indeterminate the matter of whether her insights can beconverted into either a viable politics or practicable policies for navigat-ing social justice. Insofar as Costello forswears the logic of rights as a

vehicle for defending animal welfare, her reservations alert us to trou-bling oversights that sustain liberalisms enabling ctions. At the same

time as Costello confesses her own attraction to Greek conceptions ofideal beauty, her many meditations on corporeal suffering challengethe illusion of the dignied, integrated, self-possessing body that lendslegibility to liberal discourses of rights. Accordingly, it is the predica-ment of the animal that exposes the liberal individual posited by rightslogic to be a strangely eshless, decorporealized abstraction, an entitydivested of those affective dimensions of selfhood that Costello aspiresto redeem as most vital.

In turn, at the same time asElizabeth Costellos anxieties about rights-

based theories of justice and its phenomenological vision of animalbeing are intimately related, those dual preoccupations bear directly onthe status of literature in our contemporary world. For if rights logic isinadequately attuned to faculties of experience that are decidedly aes-thetic and imaginative in their caliber, then the literary medium fulllsa crucial function in opening up those modalities of being and cobe-longing. As such, Coetzee suggests that embracing the human-animalpredicament of embodied woundedness is essential to relinquishing themany dualisms that shore up the self-certitude of instrumental reason and

our entitlements over the animal world. Once we absolve thought of itsexclusive reliance on reason, the text suggests, our evaluative delitiescan only be declared through what Merleau-Ponty calls the strange andparadoxical registers of beliefregisters of belief that can, perhaps, beespecially well captured in works of literature.

Cornell University

NOTES

1 For rights as a regime of truth and an ethic, see Inderpal Grewal, TransnationalAmerica: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms(Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2005), 12122.2 Michael Ignatieff describes rights as the lingua franca of global moral thought.Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry(Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001), 53.

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3 Aihwa Ong, Experiments with Freedom: Milieus of the Human, American LiteraryHistory18, no. 2 (2006): 237.4 J. M. Coetzee,Elizabeth Costello(New York: Penguin, 2004), hereafter cited in text.

5 Bentham, however, famously dismissed human rights as nonsense upon stilts. SeeJeremy Waldron, Nonsense Upon Stilts: Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man(London: Methuen, 1987). In his seminal Animal Liberation, Peter Singer also identiessuffering as the ground for granting animals protections (New York: HarperCollins, 1975).For the related argument that the rstand decisivequestion should be whether animalscan suffer, see Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry28, no. 2 (2002): 369418.6 For a critique of the like-us model of sameness, see Catharine A. MacKinnon, OfMice and Men: A Feminist Fragment on Animal Rights, in Animal Rights: Current Debatesand New Directions, ed. Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum (New York: Oxford Univ.Press, 2004): 26376.

7 See Sunstein and Nussbaum for an overview of these debates. For the argument thatdignity is the one overarching ideal that pervades all the UDHRs disparate rights, seeMary Ann Glendon, Propter Honoris Respectum: Knowing the Universal Declaration ofHuman Rights, Notre Dame Law Review73 (199899): 115390. For a defense of dignityrights for animals, see Steven M. Wise, Animal Rights, One Step at a Time, AnimalRights, 1950.8 Coetzees remarks about dignity are revealing. He refers to dignity as a constructand a ction . . . that sets [human beings] apart from animals. . . . The ction of dignityhelps to dene humanity and the status of humanity helps to dene human rights. GivingOffense: Essays on Censorship(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996).

9 For such arguments aboutDisgrace, see Derek Attridge, A Writers Life, The VirginiaQuarterly Review80, no. 4 (2004): 25465; Elleke Boehmer, Not Saying Sorry, Not Speak-ing Pain: Gender Implications inDisgrace, Interventions4, no. 3 (2002): 34251; MichaelMarais, Little Enough, Less Than Little: Nothing: Ethics, Engagement, and Change inthe Fiction of J. M. Coetzee, Modern Fiction Studies46, no. 1 (2000): 15982; James Meffanand Kim L. Worthington, Ethics Before Politics: J. M. CoetzeesDisgrace, in Mapping theEthical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory, ed. Todd F. David and KennethWomack (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2001). Rosemary Jolly applies such arubric simultaneously toDisgraceandElizabeth Costello, concluding that Lurie is a ctionalinterpretation of Levinas. Going to the Dogs: Humanity in J. M. CoetzeesDisgrace, TheLives of Animals, and South Africas Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in Jane Poyner,

ed., J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 2006),14871. Two notable exceptions to these dominant methodologies are worth mentioning:rst, Martin Puchner readsElizabeth Costellos treatment of animal rights through GiorgioAgambens thought, which for Puchner displac[es] philosophys anthropocentrism(31), but Puchner argues that the animal ultimately afrms the salience of rights logic.Performing the Open: Actors, Animals, Philosophers, TDR: The Drama Review51, no. 1(2007): 2132. Cora Diamond also emphasizes the centrality of embodiment in the text,which she sees, like this essay, as working to display the errors of philosophy. The Dif-culty of Reality and the Difculty of Philosophy, in Philosophy & Animal Life(New York:Columbia Univ. Press, 2008): 4389.10 See, for example, Derridas 1991 interview Eating Well, or the Calculation of theSubject and 2002 Critical Inquiry essay, The Animal That Therefore I Am (More toFollow). In addition to Derridas thought, Georges Bataille explains the disconcertingenigma that is animal consciousness. See Theory of Religion(New York: Zone, 1992). GillesDeleuze and Flix Guattari, like Coetzee, explore the function of animality in Kafkasction. See Kafka: Toward A Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: Minnesota

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Univ. Press, 1986). See also Emmanuel Levinas, The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,Difcult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sen Hand (London: Athlone, 1990).11 For overviews of the intellectual history of phenomenology as well as the complicated

question of Edmund Husserls inuence on Derrida, see Dermot Moran, Introduction toPhenomenology(New York: Routledge, 2000); M. C. Dillon, Semiological Reductionism(Albany,NY: SUNY Press, 1995); and Ian Hunter, The History of Theory, Critical Inquiry33 (2006):78112.12 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation(Durham, NC: DukeUniv. Press, 2002).13 For postcolonial theorists taking up Husserl and/or Merleau-Ponty, see among others,Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality(New York: Routledge, 2000);Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory and the Crisis of European Man, Postcolonial Studies10, no.1 (2007): 93110; Mbembe, On the Postcolony(Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of CaliforniaPress, 2001); R. Radhakrishnan, History, the Human, and the World Between(Durham, NC:

Duke Univ. Press, 2008).14 Talal Asad,Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity(Stanford, CA: StanfordUniv. Press, 2003); Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and IslamicCounterpublics(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2006); Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety:The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject(Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2005)15 For theorists who construe rights in these and related terms, see among others Gre-wal, Transnational America; Walter D. Mignolo,Citizenship, Knowledge, and the Limitsof Humanity, American Literary History18, no. 2 (2006): 31231; Pheng Cheah, InhumanConditions(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2006); Wendy Brown, The Most WeCan Hope For . . .: Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism, South Atlantic Quarterly

103, no. 2/3 (2004): 451463; Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc. (New York: FordhamUniv. Press, 2007).16 See Costas Douzinas, The End of Human Rights (Oxford: Hart, 2000); Jean-FrancoisLyotard, The Others Rights, On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993, ed.Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley (New York: Basic, 1993); Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays onReason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press,2005); Gayatri Spivak, Righting Wrongs, South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (2004):52381.17 See John McDowell, Comment on Stanley Cavells Companionable Thinking, inPhilosophy & Animal Life, 12738.18 For the origins of other episodes, see Attridge, A Writers Life.

19 For criticism preoccupied with Coetzees relationship to Costello, see Attridge, AWriters Life; David Attwell, The Life and Time of Elizabeth Costello: J. M. Coetzee andthe Public Sphere, in Poyner,J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual, 2541; andLaura Wright, A Feminist-Vegetarian Defense of Elizabeth Costello, in Poyner, 193216.20 Marjorie Garber also makes such a suggestion and readsElizabeth Costelloas a hybridof multiple, partially nonctional genres. The Lives of Animals(Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniv. Press, 1999), 79.21 While this essay by no means suggests that Coetzee overtly cites Merleau-Ponty, weshould note that Merleau-Ponty also deals at length with Khlers experiments and gestalttheory, which Khler founded, in The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Pitts-burgh, PA: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1983).22 Along the lines of Puchners analysis of the text, Donna J. Haraway also concludesthat Costello inhabits a radical language of rights and evinces a erce commitment tosovereign reason. When Species Meet(Minneapolis: Minnesota Univ. Press, 2008), 81.23 For a discussion of the expectation, see Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics,in Publics and Counterpublics(New York: Zone, 2005), 65124.

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24 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collge de France, trans. RobertVallier (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 2003).25 Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge,

2002), vii.26 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 193, xv, 388.27 Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 208.28 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL:Northwestern Univ. Press, 1968), 138, 144.29 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, 67.30 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology,173.31 Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 129.32 According to Bataille, the correct way to speak of [animal life] can overtlyonly bepoetic, in that poetry describes nothing that does not slip toward the unknowable (Theoryof Religion, 21). Derrida takes a comparable view, that thinking concerning the animal

. . . derives from poetry and represents what philosophy has essentially had to depriveitself of (The Animal, 377). Deleuze and Guattari advocate not poetry but music.Becoming Animal, in Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Thought, ed.Matthew Calarco and Peter Atterton (New York: Continuum, 2004), 95. While Merleau-Ponty primarily lauds the metaphysical dimension of painting, he explains that althoughfrom the writer and the philosopher . . . we want opinions and advice, art uniquely isable to hold the world suspended and to expose its fabric of brute meaning. Eye andMind, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson(Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1993), 123.33 Attridge, The Singularity of Literature(New York: Routledge, 2004), 77.

34 Merleau-Ponty, Visible, 144.35 Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 129.36 Sren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay (New York: Penguin,1985).

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