MAIN PRESENTERS
Denise K. Buell, Williams College
"The Microbes and Pneuma that Therefore I Am"
“As soon as we direct our attention simultaneously to the work of purification [to distinguish humans from nonhumans] and the work of hybridization, we immediately stop being wholly modern” (Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 11). Latour usefully suggests that our focus on both the efforts to distinguish the human from other beings and the proliferation of what Donna Haraway has referred to as “cyborgs” and “monsters” allows our past and future to change, including our relations to so-called premodern "nature-cultures.” In this paper, I engage early Christian texts and practices about ingestion and digestion together with contemporary philosophy and science studies that focus on neuroenterology. What kinds of “creaturely theology” might arise from the vantage point of microbial and bacterial interactions and intra-actions, especially in the gut, rather than by exploring the interactions and intra-actions of large-scale organisms (Derrida and his cat; Haraway and her dog)? Exploring ancient Christian texts with these questions in mind sheds new light on them even as they bring fresh insights to the ontological and epistemological concerns about embodiment, agency, and ethics foregrounded in current literature.
Laura Hobgood-Oster, Southwestern University
"With Dogs and Lions as Witnesses: Animals and the Word in Christianity"
And the dog ran away at once and went into the midst of the people who were with Simon, and lifting his front legs he said with a very loud voice, “Simon, Peter who stands at the door, bids you to come outside in public; for he says ‘On your account have I come to Rome, you wicked man and destroyer of simple souls.’” (The Acts of Peter)
The elevation of words, of language, as a marker of the superiority of humans is quite pronounced in Christianity. Some might even claim that “the Word” is the central theological idea that undergirds the belief system. God speaks to and through prophets, revelation relies on the insights of the word, scripture – the written word – is sacred. “The Word” was in the beginning and was with God. Upon hearing the story of the preaching dog in the early Christian apocryphal text, most people are either amazed or skeptical or both. Christianity, along with many religions, elevates the human above all other animals making them dominant and even ontologically superior. How could speaking animals have a role? I contend that remembering the sometimes forgotten tales of speaking animals can provide a much-needed corrective to a tradition that has become a stronghold for anthropocentrism and human-dominance. I argue that, by entering the conversation, these speaking animals break the verbal exclusivity and privilege of humans in the tradition placing other animals in direct connection to the divine and including them in circles of salvation.
Jennifer L. Koosed and Robert Paul Seesengood, Albright College
"Daniel's Animal Apocalypse"
Beasts—real, cooked, psychological, regal, divine, mythical and monstrous—wriggle, graze, claw and growl their way through every chapter of the book of Daniel. From the beginning, Daniel declares that he will have a different relationship to animals, that is, to God: Daniel decides not to eat meat rather than violate kosher regulations. But as the court tales transform into apocalyptic visions, animals morph into fantastical beasts, and then cease to be altogether: there are no animals at the end of time. As Daniel envisions the end, he disavows the animal as he defies human mortality. Yet, the animal cannot be denied. In Daniel, sovereigns become beasts, monstrous beasts establish divinity, and the borders of God, human and animal are repeatedly blurred. The animal keeps erupting at various levels of text and context, no category remains fixed or pure, not even the language of the text remains stable as the story arbitrarily changes from Hebrew to Aramaic then back again, added to, in time, by a stuttering Greek. In the book of Daniel, the human, the divine and the bestial, like language and eschatology, do not have fixed interstitial spaces.
Glen A. Mazis, Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg
"Animals, Before Me, With Whom I Live, By Whom I am Addressed, Writing after Derrida"
In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida takes to task not only Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan and Levinas, but the tradition of those philosophers and other thinkers who took no account of being seen by the animal since “they have taken no account of the fact that what they call ‘animal’ could look at them, and address them from down there, from a wholly other origin” (12). This stance gives rise to a discourse about animality that is a zoo, an abattoir. Derrida notes that in his own discourse there is a proliferation of animals as he asks whether anything of the human can be without our following after, our affiliation, with animals, the being-with-the-animal. The violence of the phrase—“the animal”—as if there were such a thing instead of animalities is part of the violence of the opposing “the human” to “the animal.” I agree with Derrida’s assertions that Levinas really has no idea of the face, when he can’t see one in animals, that Lacan’s unconscious is strangely Cartesian in excluding animals, and that these thinkers draw upon a tradition of violence promulgated as ethics. Interestingly, in The Beast and the Sovereign, the most exceptional of the humans, outside the law with the beast, the sovereign, is predicated through analogy with a set of characteristics of animals, yet they are strange fictions that undermine the idea of human sovereignty and fall back into the mechanical. Derrida is correct in asserting the past two centuries saw a turn with shift of discourse from asking whether animals could think as to whether they could suffer—a question with an obvious answer. Yet, key texts are littered with wolves, foxes, lions whose figural depictions are projections of human exceptionalism—examined in detail by this paper. Divinanimality is a processual seeing as being seen, at odds with the discourse Derrida documents—a “reversibility” like that articulated in a layered perception, affect, collective memory, et al., by Merleau-Ponty with the multiple ways of being animal reverberating within care for flourishing—non-hierarchical, co-creative, and answering to an enmeshed community.
Jay McDaniel, Hendrix College
"Listening to Animals: Continental and Process Thought in Conversation," with Aaron Simmons
Abstract coming soon.
Stephen D. Moore`, Drew Theological School
"Ecotheriology"
…all the beasts from John’s Revelation,…the reading of which would merit more than one seminar…. (Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 1:24)
Imperial Rome is figured in the Book of Revelation as a therion, a “beast” or “wild beast.” But divine sovereignty also accorded an animal face in Revelation, that of a Lamb. What is the Lamb’s relationship to the Beast? Derrida notes the perennial tendency to cast the animal in dichotomized terms: the absolutely good, innocent animal without fault or defect, on one side, and the absolutely evil, cruel, murderously savage animal, on the other (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 64). Both incarnations of the animal pad their way through Revelation. The domestic animal, the Lamb, is ostensibly without fault or defect, which makes it the perfect sacrificial victim, while the wild animal, the Beast, is absolutely corrupt, its cruelty signifying that it is a figure for human savagery. Yet human savagery is also represented in Revelation by the figure of a wild woman, a hypersexualized female utterly out of (male) control. One cannot easily say where the “great prostitute” Babylon ends and the Beast begins, and not only because both are figures for empire. This paper will attempt to tease out the dense knots of animality, sexuality, and sovereignty in Revelation’s theriology.
Kate Rigby, Monash University, Australia
"Animal Calls"
This paper proceeds from an understanding of Creation (informed by James Hatley’s ecophilosophical reading of Levinas) as woven and rewoven through multiple interchanges of call and response to a discussion of some of the ways in which animals might be considered to be calling upon humans in the context of the current humanly engendered mass extinction event. Within this frame, I want to consider in particular the role of warning calls, beginning with a discussion of the Australian magpie, which are also understood by other bird species, earning this extraordinary singer the nickname, “policeman of the bush”. Moving from the terrain of ornithology to that of cultural history, I proceed to a consideration of the ways in which animal, and especially bird calls, have been seen to provide warnings of various kinds to humans also. The paper concludes with a question concerning our capacity to apprehend and respond to the warning calls that are currently issuing from the animal kingdom concerning the ecological future into which we are now heading.
Ken Stone, Chicago Theological Seminary
"The Dogs of Exodus and the Question of the Animal"
In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida’s critique of Levinas includes discussion of a piece by Levinas, “Name of a Dog,” which opens and closes with references to two passages from Exodus that refer to dogs. Like most commentators on Levinas, Derrida gives minimal attention to the biblical passages referred to by Levinas. However, a reading of these two biblical texts and several related texts from Exodus uncovers a complex picture of humans, animals, and God that stands in tension with the binary opposition between “Animal” and “Man” that Derrida and other thinkers attempt to problematize. These biblical texts blur the line between humans and animals in multiple ways even as they differentiate both categories internally. Thus the dogs of Exodus may lead readers to unexpected ways of thinking “the question of the animal.” By looking carefully at the ways in which biblical literature construes relationships among humans, animals, and God, we may imagine alternatives to both the humanist opposition between “Man” and “Animal” that has been widespread in modernity, and the religious version of that opposition which is based upon a narrow selection of biblical and theological texts.
RESPONDENTS & DISCUSSANTS
Marc Boglioli is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, Environmental Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies at Drew University whose work focuses on human-animal relationships, gender, and modernity. He has conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork on Euro-American hunters in rural Vermont, which resulted in a recent book, A Matter of Life and Death: Hunting in Contemporary Vermont (2009); and ethnohistorical work on Native American sacred places. Currently, he is investigating the ways that understandings of human-environment relationships and whiteness coalesce to construct local identities in rural America, and finishing up an extended theoretical piece on the essentialization of "Western human-nature relations"--what he refers to as ecological occidentalism.
Virginia Burrus is Professor of Early Church History and Chair of the Graduate Division of Religion at Drew University. Her scholarly interests in the field of ancient Christianity include: gender, sexuality, and the body; martyrdom and asceticism; ancient novels and hagiography; constructions of orthodoxy and heresy; histories of theology and historical theologies. She is author, most recently, of Seducing Augustine: Bodies, Desires, Confessions, co-authored with Mark Jordan and Karmen MacKendrick (2010); and Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints, and Other Abject Subjects (2007). Areas of current scholarly interest include ancient understandings of materiality, creation, beauty, and the miraculous; a long-standing interest in hagiography continues as well. Earlier this year she gave a paper entitled “Wyschogrod’s Hand: Saints, Animality, and the Labor of Love” at a conference in honor of the memory of philosopher Edith Wyschogrod, and also delivered a lecture at Fordham University entitled “Saints and Other Animals: The Limits of Humanity.”
Danna Nolan Fewell is Professor of Hebrew Bible at Drew University. Her teaching and research interests focus upon literary, cultural, and ideological approaches to biblical narrative, the Bible in art, children and biblical literature, and the ethics of reading. Her major works include: Icon of Loss: The Haunting Child of Samuel Bak (2009); Representing the Irreparable: The Shoah, the Bible, and the Art of Samuel Bak (2008); The Children of Israel: Reading the Bible for the Sake of Our Children (2003); Narrative in the Hebrew Bible (1993); and Gender, Power, and Promise: The Subject of the Bible’s First Story (1993).
Antonia Gorman obtained her doctorate from Drew University with a dissertation on secularized “atonement” paradigms that sacrifice animals in the quest for human “salvation.” Two case studies illustrated the thesis: medical salvation through the vivisection of animals and free market salvation through the sacrifice of endangered species and their habitats. Currently, she is a research executive whose clients include the Humane Society’s (HSUS) Faith Outreach Program. For the HSUS, she has compiled denominational faith statements on animals and is updating a 1906 book entitled The Church and Kindness to Animals. Her other recent publications include essays for EcoSpirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth (2007) and the Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability (2010).
Catherine Keller is Professor of Constructive Theology in the Graduate Division of Religion and the Theological School of Drew University. She develops the spectrum of recent philosophical, feminist, and eco-political theologies in interaction with wider traditions of cosmology and mysticism. Books she has authored include Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World (1996); God and Power (2005); The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (2003); and On the Mystery (2008). She has co-edited multiple volumes of the Drew Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium, including Postcolonial Theologies (2004); Ecospirit (2007); Apophatic Bodies (2009); and, most recently, Polydoxy (2010). She is currently writing Cloud of the Impossible: Theological Entanglements.
Mayra Rivera is Assistant Professor of Theology and Latina/o Studies at Harvard Divinity School. Her current research examines uses of "flesh" and "body" in contemporary debates about the material and performative elements of corporeality. She is author of The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God (2007) and co-editor with Stephen Moore of Planetary Loves: Spivak, Postcoloniality, and Theology (2011) and with Catherine Keller and Michael Nausner of Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire (2004).
Mary-Jane Rubenstein is Associate Professor of Religion at Wesleyan University, where she teaches continental philosophies of religion and modern Christian thought. She is the author of Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe (2009) and of numerous articles on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, negative theology, and the crisis over sex and gender in the Anglican Communion. She is currently working on a book about ancient and contemporary models of the multiverse, provisionally entitled Worlds without End: Cosmology and Multiplicity.
Carol Wayne White is Professor of Philosophy of Religion and a faculty member of the Comparative Humanities Program at Bucknell University. Her publications include Poststructuralism, Feminism, and Religion: Triangulating Positions (2002), The Legacy of Anne Conway (1631-70): Reverberations from a Mystical Naturalism (2009), and multiple articles addressing the intersections of critical theory, process thought, and religion. Dr. White is currently completing a book that explores expanded views of the human within the frameworks of postmodern science and religious naturalism. She is increasingly interested in understanding the kinship and differences among various species that challenge outdated conceptions of distinctive human nature in the West.
STUDENT PRESENTERS
An Yountae, Drew University
"Entering into the Serpent: Mestizaje, Animal Abyss, and Decolonial Freedom."
This paper explores the significance of animal in Gloria Anzaldúa’s work. In her book Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa deploys animal imageries as the symbol of cosmic spirituality which is rooted in the aboriginal Pre-Columbian tradition of Olmecs. However, in Anzaldúa’s work, animal also hints at the multiple layers of signification epitomized by her own mestiza identity. It is both the decentering point of rupture towards a new consciousness and the point of retorno (return); both negation (animal gaze/darkness/the unknown) and affirmation (energy/creativity/birth); both the mark of interstitial identity and the trace of creaturely life/energy. In order to account to this ambivalence, I will read the animal in Anzaldua’s work via the dialectical relationship between freedom and abyss.
Born out of the vision of post-enlightenment liberalism, modern/contemporary notion of freedom has been associated with the notion of sovereignty accompanied by the individualistic understanding of subjectivity, thus mobilizing the Western ideal of both political freedom (Western model of democracy) and economic freedom (global capitalism). However, recent burgeoning endeavor of some contemporary continental philosophers offers a different way of understanding the notion of freedom. By drawing on the works of Schelling, Hegel and Heidegger, they have turned to the “abyssal dimension” of freedom thus making groundlessness the very ground for the conception of freedom.
In resonance with this continental re-conception of freedom, I will attempt to explore the decolonial vision of Anzaldúa’s work which evokes a complex scrutiny of the abyssal dimension of freedom. I argue that the animal as a symbol of ambivalence in Anzaldúa’s work materializes the dialectical tension between freedom and abyss. Anzaldúa’s decolonial vision suggests that we conceive freedom as a collective vision of a new consciousness grounded in the groundless depth of the unknown, the abyssal gaze of the absolute other, and the ineffable trauma of the colonial/sexual/non-human other. Just as the animal signifies not only the vibrant energy but also the abyssal groundlessness of creaturely life, thus dissembling the notion of the sovereign subject, I argue that freedom, which is another name for (the possibility of) the divine, displaces the human subject by revealing both the precarious ground of social existence and the inexhaustibility of creaturely existence.
Christy Cobb, Drew University
"Leonine Animality and Ambiguity in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles"
Animals appear with consistent frequency in the narratives of late antiquity. As Pliny the Elder noted, lions were – more often than other animals – represented as providers of clemency to humans. The authors of early Christian hagiographical literature portray lions actively interacting with humans, speaking to saints, and revering major characters. Yet, lions also participate in such texts simply by allowing the saint to live. Focusing on the narratives of the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles (AAA), specifically on the Acts of Thecla, the Acts of Paul, and the Acts of Xanthippe, Polyxena, and Rebecca, this paper explores the ambiguity of leonine representation through a blurring of the lines between animal, saint, and divine.
The figure of Thecla is identified with lions in both text and artistic representations. For example, in the second-century text Acts of Thecla, Thecla is pictured bound to and riding on a “fierce lioness” who reveres her by licking the saint’s feet (section 28). When Thecla is forced to fight other animals in the arena, a lioness fiercely protects her, killing other animals in the process. In the end, it is this courageous lioness who becomes martyr, allowing Thecla to live in her place. Yet, Ambrose’s version of Thecla’s story sexualizes the lion in order to highlight Thecla’s virginity. In fact, the lion himself becomes a virgin in this text (Ambrose, Concerning Virginity 2.3.2). The relationship between Thecla and the lions is further complicated when considering the artistic representations where the saint is pictured with not one but two lions.
In the Acts of Paul, another lion is condemned to fight in the arena, this time with Paul. While in the arena, the apostle speaks to the lion, who speaks back, indicating that Paul had earlier baptized him. This lion, then, is a Christian lion – a baptized, speaking lion. As the fighting begins in the arena, a miraculous hailstorm occurs that enables both Paul and the lion to escape death, although other animals and humans in the arena are not so fortunate. Ambiguity abounds in this text as well, when considering who receives liberation as a result of the hailstorm, Paul or the lion, who returns to his original non-speaking state (section 16).
In the Acts of Xanthippe, Polyxena and Rebecca, Polyxena finds shelter in the empty den of a lioness. When the lion returns to her den, Polyxena prays and begs the lion to “tear her not” (section 27). Her prayer and request is answered as the lioness allows her to live and leads her out of the woods safely. When Rebecca encounters the apostle Andrew, a lioness appears and speaks aloud Rebecca’s prayer, which includes gratitude to God for pouring mercy upon “irrational and untamable beasts” (section 30). Finally, when Polyxena, like Thecla and Paul, is condemned to fight for her life in the arena, a loyal lioness runs to her and licks her feet instead of attacking her. Drawing out the ambiguity of leonine representation in these texts, my analysis will build upon Virginia Burrus’ recent work on animality, particularly addressing her statement, “it will not seem mere coincidence that Saints’ Lives frequently feature non-human animals in contexts that blur the lines between saint and animal” (“Saints and Other Animals: The Limits of Humanity,” paper presented at the Fordham Graduate Theology Conference, 2011). This paper will further complicate this relationship by introducing the divine into the blurred association between saint and animal. Highlighting the complex relationships that exist between animal, human, and divine, I will ultimately consider who is martyred, who is liberated, and who speaks in the texts of the AAA – the saint, the lion, or the divine.
Brianne Donaldson, Claremont School of Theology
"Animal Bodies and the Unruly Soul: Rethinking Animal Liberation with Butler and Jain Karma"
In Jain cosmology, animal bodies are one of many material pit stops for the unchanging soul as it travels toward its human form and eventually toward moksa, or liberation. While humans and animals are seen as karmically equivalent due to their membership in the class of five-sensed organisms, Jain karma theory asserts that the human body (and for some Jains, the male human body) is the best vehicle by which a soul can reach moksa. Not a great start for a poststructural rethinking of human and animal relations.
The strict Jain dualism between the unchanging soul and material bodies long predates the Cartesian, Kantian and Enlightenment splits. At first glance, Jain karma theory appears not only to privilege the soul as outside the transitory material world, but also to devalue any body not in human (and often male) form.
This paper examines the Jain concept of the soul alongside Judith Butler’s critique of structural law and, indeed, of all strategic essentialisms that posit an “outside.” In Jain philosophy the atman (soul) is exterior and essentialist insofar as it is changeless and utterly separate from transitory matter. But I argue that Jains also directly challenged Vedic elitism and animal sacrifice by positing a soul based on self-realization that was metaphysically and politically inclusive of all life.
Further, I contend that Butler’s notion of irreducibility perhaps surprisingly represents a similar “outside.” For Butler, irreducibility functions as an apophatic reserve that destabilizes those exclusionary power structures that perpetuate the fixed identities of bodies. In both Butler and Jainism, bodies are always more than the names we give them. I compare the irreducible souls in Jainism, which can only be understood in relation to their unique, karmically embodied paths, to Butler’s own description of the soul as a “social signification that perpetually renounces itself as such.” Social souls and bodies cannot be reduced to isolated identities. Butler and Jainism affirm both soul and body, rather than realizing a Cartesian elevation of the soul that defines bodies as lack.
By my reading, Butler and Jain karma theory both utilize (what appears as) a soul/body dualism in order to emphasize those social dimensions of identity that escape totalizing conceptual categorizations. I trace similar dualisms in Catherine Keller’s work on the changing bodily ground, in Deleuze and Guattari’s actual and virtual “body without organs,” and in Whitehead’s world of embodied fact and world of abstract value.
And then it strikes us: the interrelated, emergent phenomena of body and mind pile up on one side of a binary, and something unrepresentable occupies the other. Dualism here opens beyond itself to a multiplicity of origins, bodies, and becomings that together constitute the evolving universe. The essential incompleteness of this multiplicity has concrete consequences: it displaces language and signification, decenters anthropocentrism, and points toward a noncoercive social responsibility.
In reading Butler and Jainism in this way, I hint at a poststructural metaphysics that challenges traditional animal liberation arguments, dependent as they are on an intelligible creature, an intelligible liberation movement, and intelligible selves. Discourses of exploitation and liberation that produce “animal” bodies give way to costly conversations about life as “free intensities” (Deleuze). These intensities are bodily amalgamations of social agency that also leave us, as so-called humans, fearfully free in our own sociality. Such socially dynamic identity renders us unable to call upon prescribed norms to guide our actions and political ethics, yet all the more compelled to act. Sacrificing easy narratives of emancipation – narratives that re-perform that same anthropocentric, imperialistic, and appropriative reductionism that justified violence in the first place – is the new task for critical animal thought.
Jake Erickson, Drew Theological School
"The Apophatic Animal: Towards a Negative Zootheological Imago Dei"
To see the mystery of the divine with whiskers, a tail, or scales. What would it mean to re-imagine the mysterious image of God emerging from a bottomless relation to our animal companions? Can we? “No,” most theologians try to tell us. Human beings are created in the image of God. The uniqueness of humanity is what exposes the divine image, what gives humans and demands human control (dominion) over their ecological environs.
But recent ecological theology points out the dangers of such a logic. Of the doctrines and symbols of the Christian theological tradition, the human imago dei as read from the creation myths in Genesis has played as particularly destructive role in scapegoating planetary life for the sake of humans. As Larry Rasmussen observes, “Imago dei set us apart from the rest of nature as free agents who act upon it in responsibility before God…But it was stewardship in the mode of mastery, control, and good management, all determined by an anthropocentrism of interests” (Earth Community, Earth Ethics, 189). Following the exposure of dangers, this paper tracks an alternative, seeking instead to discern the imago dei as that which disrupts the devastations of our ecological anthropocentrism. Engaging primarily the critical animal studies of philosopher Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway, this paper attempts to reimagine the imago Dei as a deconstructive movement of creaturely relationality. Rather than turning to positive doctrines of created humanity or Christology, such an image grounds itself in the apophatic negativity of a pneumatological anima, the mysterious, creative animation of all creatures. Such a Spirit-image is neither stagnate nor an essentiality, but follows, migrates, moves, and unsettles the dust of our creatureliness in the divine wake of biodiversity.
Beatrice Marovich, Drew Theological School
"Little Bird in my Praying Hands: Rilke and the Autoimmunity of God’s Animal Body"
In his posthumously published The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008), Jacques Derrida suggests that modern western politics—configured around the human actor—has made a double exclusion of the ahuman in two forms: the divine and the animal. He names this exclusion, in a pinch, “divinanimality” and clarifies that it is not only the site of the “excluded, disavowed, tamed, and sacrificed” but that this exclusion is also the very foundation of what it is excluded from, “the symbolic order, the human order, law and justice” (132). In his volume of lectures The Beast and the Sovereign (2009), Derrida makes it clear that this social space—comprised of the beast and the divine sovereign—follows the political logic of exclusion as articulated by the German political theorist Carl Schmitt (see, e.g., Beast, 49-50). The state of exception, in other words (here the ahuman, the divine, the beast) is what characterizes and founds political authority (see Schmitt, Political Theology). The sovereign is a beast.
In this paper I would like to complicate this political configuration through a reading of Rainer Maria Rilke’s fables that he named Stories of God (1900). I will argue that Rilke presents us with a cosmic scenario in which God—who is, in these stories, very much a beastly and animal sovereign—is subject to a kind of autoimmunity. The animal body of the immortal God, as he is creaturized or mortalized in these tales, makes God autoimmune. This autoimmunity troubles the claim that God is either the pure exception or the pure sovereign by illustrating a God who is subject—like all life on earth—to autoimmunity. God is included in a phenomenon that characterizes life itself.
In biological terms, an autoimmune disorder is when an organism attempts to protect itself but only ends up damaging its own immune system in the process. Derrida read autoimmunity in philosophical terms as the failure of an entity (or a concept) to protect itself from its own undoing. Rather than read this as something problematic or undesirable, however, Derrida argued that this strange logic was the very condition of possibility (and perhaps also ethics) itself. “Autoimmunity is not an absolute ill or evil,” he wrote. “It enables an exposure to the other, to who and what comes. … Without autoimmunity, with absolute immunity, nothing would ever happen or arrive” (Rogues, 152). There is no pure state of life, or health, that is free from the threat of death or disease. Rather, there is an almost toxic aspect to life—the threat of death is woven into the possibility of more life and without this threat we would have nothing at all. In Rilke’s fables, I will argue, the threat of creatureliness and mortality is woven into the nature of God’s creatorly immortality and is the very condition of its possibility.
In these fables, this autoimmunity is a threat to God—his sovereign authority is tested and challenged. Significantly, God has a problem with his animalized hands: his right hand knows not what his left hand does. When he creates the human, his left hand drops man, enraging the right. In a later tale God’s right hand actually attacks and tears at the left, spilling God’s blood and tears all over the earth. God fails—like a mortal creature—to gain control over his own animal body. It attacks and destroys him, veers out of his own control, as any animal body is given to do. His immortal powers are limited by his animal body.
But, crucially, this autoimmunity is also the very site of God’s possibility, reality, or actuality. It is God’s opportunity to become real for life on earth. God appears, for the characters in these fables, in strange ways as an animal body. One little boy testifies to his friends that he’s certain God is “absolutely necessary” and he is sure that this necessary thing is real because God appeared one evening, as a little bird in the boy’s clasped, praying hands (Rilke, Stories of God, 82-83). It is God’s divinanimality that allows him to be carried around in a child’s pocket, to appear as the stranger at the door, to become a thimble lost in the grass, or to live vicariously (and to touch himself) through the body of Michelangelo. The divinanimality of Rilke’s God, conditioned (as we are) by autoimmunity, is a divine that is haunted by traces of animality. He engages with a world of creatures whose animal bodies are haunted by traces of divinity. In conversation with Derrida and Rilke (and, to a lesser degree, with Schmitt) I endeavor to illustrate that it is the autoimmune animal bodies of each that allow for these configurations.
Peter Anthony Mena, Drew Theological School
"Late Ancient Mestizaje: An Anzalduan Reading of Longus and Jerome"
Gloria Anzaldúa has theorized race and identity constructions for Latinas/os in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. In positing the hybridity of these identities Anzaldúa has crossed several borders—including the human-animal divide. For Anzaldúa, inhabitants of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands are not simply a “mixture” of both cultures but rather, something new—a “New Meztizaje”. This mestizaje is characterized by its whiteness, brownness, blackness, humanity, animality; all of these categories—and at the same time none of them—do justice to defining this new mestizaje. This paper seeks to use Anzaldúa’s notions of identity-making under the pressures of imperial dominance in order to think of similar identity constructions taking place in two late-ancient texts—Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe and Jerome’s Life of Paul.
I choose to juxtapose these two texts for two reasons. First, their depictions of bucolic and desert life and the creatures engendered by these spaces are useful in thinking about the relationship between space and mestizaje. Longus’s countryside and Jerome’s desert—much like Anzaldúa’s borderlands—engender a hybrid mestizaje and with it a new epistemology necessary to move the plots of both narratives. Secondly, I hope to continue a trajectory of scholarship that has demonstrated the similarities between the ancient romances and Christian hagiography—and thereby complicating notions of genre. In both Daphnis and Chloe and the Life of Paul, wolves (in particular) and other animals (in general) play pivotal roles for the plots of these narratives. Though I will discuss the roles of various countryside and desert creatures, I will focus my argument more particularly on the roles of the wolves in each text. I will argue that late ancient Mediterranean culture was such that, these texts cross human-animal boundaries in the service of constructing hybrid identities.
Eric Daryl Meyer, Fordham University
"The Logos of God and the End of Man: Animality as Light and Life"
The Gospel of John begins with a logos. Very quickly, this logos not only measures up to God, but is also named as the zoe and phos of anthropon (the life and light of human beings [1:4]). Announcing bleak catastrophes both past and future, John explains that humanity has misrecognized the logos which is the light of its life, and darkly refuses to offer it any welcome (1:5, 10-11). Whatever native logos (discourse, rationality) resides with humanity, it does not recognize the logos who, by John’s account, is the source and substance of human zoe.
What kind of zoe marks a rupture between logos and logos? What life separates the divine logos from that creature who calls himself the zoon logikon (the rational animal)? Is it “life” in the abstract—so that humanity’s logos is bound up with death as such? Is the zoe of God a divine spark imparted to homo sapiens alone of all creatures, so that when John explains zoen aionion (eternal life) and zoe kai anastasis (life and resurrection), these are matters which concern only humanity? What would change if God’s incarnate zoe were understood as bare life, animation, an animality that is common to all animals, human and otherwise?
My paper develops an understanding of the incarnation by placing the biblical locus classicus for the doctrine (John 1) in conversation with Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida. Through his elaboration of the “anthropological machine” in The Open and the delicate distinction between zoe and bios in Homo Sacer, Agamben provides a theoretical framework in which “humanity” can be seen as the by-product of a process whereby human beings modify, control, repress, and disavow zoe (bare life, animality) in order to produce a categorically distinct human way-of-life (bios). In Derrida’s terms, humanity (more specifically, subjectivity and self-consciousness) is the remainder that persists after an animal disavows its own animality by “announcing himself to himself” as something other.
Working with Agamben and Derrida in a theological direction, I begin by distinguishing between humanity and human beings. Humanity is an exclusive quality categorically separated from animality by its possessive grip on a proprietary logos (speech, reason); human beings are bodies, animals, subject to (and subjectivized within) humanity. I will argue that the bios of humanity, with its unique logos, is cut off not only from the zoe of the many animals (zoon) who share the land, air, and seas, but also, cataclysmically, from its own zoe and from the zoe of God. From this starting point, John’s account of incarnation describes a refusal wherein human logos cannot acknowledge the animality of the divine—the zoe which God shares with creatures. Nevertheless, this zoe is the life of salvation—animality rendered eternal through a divine zôon. Within this perspective, the answer to the question “Cur deus homo?” must be that through the incarnation, God subverts humanity from within. Human beings must be saved from humanity (and the distinctively human logos) for the sake of the zoe of creation. The salvation of human beings wrought through the incarnation—God in human flesh—is a salvific function of divine animality, and not heaven’s endorsement of humanity as a categorically exceptional creature.
Erika Murphy, Drew Theological School
"Devouring the Human: Digestion of a Corporeal Soteriology"
Our division between the categories of animal and human may be linked in part to our fear of being associated with limitation: the concept that we are “only” animal robs us of our imagined place in the ecological hierarchy and threatens the human identity as superior. But perhaps another reason we keep these categories is because of the equally threatening possibility that we share the capacity of the animal in its connection to the infinite. When bitten by the family dog Fips as a child, Hélenè Cixous suddenly realizes “the meat we are”: finite, and vulnerable (Stigmata, 258). And yet according to Cixous the bite also reveals Fips’ excessive suffering and infinite capacity for love and need for connection. Cixous compares Fips both to Job and to Christ, claiming “as a lamb the dog is born to give his life for us” (Stigmata, 250). Cixous mourns the fact that Fips gives his life for the family, a gesture she was unable to return. Although the aggressive attack is not life-threatening, Cixous allows her encounter with Fips to completely penetrate her sense of self: in this sense, the bite becomes consuming.
With the help of biblical scholars such as Stephen Moore and Hugh Pyper, I will explore how Cixous’ profound experience as consumed “meat” is connected to Christ’s own offering of his body as food in the Gospel of John; we are warned by Jesus, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (Jn 6:53). Indeed, As Pyper points out, Cixous’ further reflections on “the meat we are” makes implicit connections to the consumption of Christ: a link made explicit by Moore’s God’s Gym, with, for example, the image of Jesus as “the slaughtered lamb” (God’s Gym, 113). Jesus is consumed as animal, human, and divine “meat.”
And yet in order for a mutual exchange to take place, we cannot simply act as consumer, allowing our bodies to digest but remain intact. Cixous’ story and the story of Christ cannot come to fruition if we retain our often unreflective category of “human” as hierarchical consumer as opposed to the animal who comprises the category of consumed. I will suggest that the human needs to be consumed by the animal in order to develop a taste for the divine. Whether this consumption comes in the form of a literal collision, as in the case of Cixous, or in the form of more complex portrayal of Jesus as lamb, the revelation of the flesh of humanity is a revelation of animality—which is also a revelation of divinity. When we recognize the fleshy impermanence of our bodies, categories of divine/human/animal break down, revealing that our greatest fear of animality is perhaps in part due to our fear of discovering our authentic connection to the divine.
Stephanie Day Powell and Amy Beth Jones, Drew Theological School
"You are the Man! The Traumatic Survival of the Human from the Animal in the Hebrew Bible"
On April 25, 2011 an openly gay man, insurance company owner and horse trainer, Brent Whitehouse, of McConnelsville, Ohio was the victim of an overt hate crime as someone scrawled “fags are freaks” and “burn in hell” across his barn before setting fire to it, killing eight quarter horses including a one-month old foal. The incident has garnered the compassionate financial support of an unusual mix of advocates, including firefighters, gay rights groups, animal rights advocates and even Mr. Whitehouse’s property insurers. The story bears uncanny resemblance to the parable of the ewe lamb in 2 Samuel 12:1-12. Innocent, prized, nurtured and most of all alive, the ewe lamb’s senseless fate stirs an unadulterated moral outrage within David that renders him easily vulnerable to Nathan’s indictment. But with whom does David identify? As biblical scholar Jeremy Schipper has argued, the parable’s ambiguity allows for multiple identifications in relation to the David/Bathsheba/Uriah affair that precedes it. David, in Schipper’s view, images himself as the traveler in the parable, the innocent bystander who may eschew responsibility for the rich man’s actions. Nathan’s proclamation, “You are the man!” is understood as a necessary correction to David’s misinterpretation. Schipper’s reading does not account, however, for David’s visceral, even vengeful, reaction to the lamb’s death. With the varied individuals (who similarly bear out multiple identifications) who have rallied around Mr. Whitehouse, David shares a fundamental—Freud might even say instinctive—empathic connection with the animal. The reasons for these identifications are complex; certainly the intimacy between the animals and humans in both narratives accounts for their emotional impact. Yet at the psychological level, the distressing nature of each episode rests on humans being both like and not like their fellow sentient creatures. Our stupefaction in the face of animal mortality reflects the deeper trauma of human separation from the animal that arguably goes back to creation itself. Freud theorized that humanity’s conscious awakening from inanimate matter constituted a primordial shock from which we have been attempting to recover throughout history. Literary theorist Cathy Caruth extends Freud’s insights and asserts it is not the escape from death but the paradoxical incomprehensibility of survival that ultimately characterizes all traumatic experience. Building on these ideas, the catastrophic nature of Nathan’s parable and the McConnelsville arson lies not only in the shock of the animals’ deaths but the subsequent trauma of human survival, as each narrative effectively evokes the inexplicable divide between human and animal consciousness.
Beginning with the proposed reading of 2 Samuel 12:1-12, this paper considers the human separation from the animal in the Hebrew Bible from a theological and psychoanalytic perspective. As both the animal and the human are endowed with nephesh, ancient Israel’s worldview demonstrates considerable ambiguity regarding their relationship. In the first creation story, where each aspect of the created order is otherwise clearly demarcated, the status of human beings – situated as they are between animals and divine beings – is remarkably indeterminate. The double trauma that is human consciousness and divine accountability compels one to repeatedly return to the boundary between animal and human to master the separation once and for all. With Nathan’s insistence, “You are the man!” David must awaken from the innocence of animality and come to terms with the incomprehensible survival of a troubled kingship. Centuries later, David’s existential ordeal is not so different from our own as we continue to grapple with the violent aftermath of a divided creation.
Matt Riley, Drew Theological School
"Fuel-Efficient Creatures: Ecotheology and Lynn White’s Animal-Machines"
Lynn White Jr., a historian of Medieval technology, is best known for his 1967 article, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” in which he asserts that Christianity “bears a huge burden of guilt” for our current environmental crisis (1206). Since the publication of this now infamous article, ecotheologians have taken up White’s challenge to reinterpret Christian notions of dominion, to assess and revise the human-nature divide that White finds in Christian Scriptures, and to respond to White’s assertion that a rethinking of religion is a necessary, but not sufficient, component of any response to the ecological crisis. However, this paper suggests that White’s treatment of animals and the prominent role that they have played in his writings is largely unexamined. For example, although largely unreferenced in the myriad responses to White, his two principal texts on the intersection of religion and ecology, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” and “Continuing the Conversation,” both begin with White’s own experiences with animals and the formative role they played in shaping his understanding of the intersection of religion and environmental attitudes.
In this paper, I will argue that it is not just dominion or the general disenchantment of nature which bothers White, but also an “indifference to the possibility of autonomy in other creatures” (“Continuing the Conversation,” 63) which he links closely with changing attitudes towards animals and technology. By rereading White and his larger body of work alongside the texts of Donna Haraway, Laura Hobgood-Oster, and Glen Mazis, I will attempt to highlight the ways in which animals (and animal-machines) can be understood as a central concern of White’s. As a historian of medieval technology, he builds his argument concerning the impact of religion on ecological attitudes by citing a number of instances in which the lines between animals, humans, and machines are blurred. Two examples which he returns to frequently are depictions of Temperance as a human female with her internal organs replaced with clockworks and each of her extremities bedecked with the latest gadgetry of the era and that of the draft horse which, when coupled with the latest Medieval technology, White describes as a “rapid and efficient power-engine” (“Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages,” 19).
Thus, while much of the ecotheological response to White has focused on reinterpreting notions of dominion and stewardship, human-nature relations, and on the role of religion in shaping environmental attitudes, this paper will offer an alternative interpretation of White in which concern over animals, machines, and the blurred boundaries between them is central. This stance, I argue, is consistent with White’s suggestion that Christians adopt Francis of Assisi as the patron saint of ecology. While he does not suggest “that many contemporary Americans who are concerned about our ecologic crisis will be either able or willing to counsel with wolves or exhort birds” as St. Francis did (“Historical Roots,” 1207), White does seem to suggest that any theological answer to the ecological crisis needs to reconsider human attitudes towards technology and animal subjectivity.
Terra Rowe, Drew Theological School
"The Animality of God"
In 1956, after the inhumanity of two world wars and genocide, Karl Barth spoke of the need to shift his theological focus from wholly otherness to “The Humanity of God.” This shift became more broadly felt in following generations as theologians further emphasized “God with us” or God who has felt our pain and suffers with us. This shift was, in a way, radicalized by liberation theology’s insistence on a God with us who has chosen the poor, oppressed and suffering. These movements changed the face of theology for the 20th century by emphasizing God’s presence with and through humanity in a way like never before.
On the other hand, this theological face remained much the same as in centuries before; when God is given a face it is distinctly human. In a new theological and philosophical moment influenced as much by the more-than-human suffering resulting from eco-crises as human suffering this distinctly human face of God is raising questions which Barth and those following did not ask: what then also of the animality of God? and what does it mean for human/non-human relations if God exclusively chose humanity as the site of incarnation?
In contrast to and appreciation of the trajectory of the humanity of God, this paper will explore the animality of God. Inspired by Laurel Schneider’s call for the multiplicity of Christ and incarnations in Beyond Monotheism and John Cobb’s work in Christ in a Pluralistic Age toward an understanding of Christ as a principle and power of creative transformation in history, I propose to pursue questions of divinity and animality in light of the transforming and metamorphic figure of Christ. Specifically, I will explore the meaning and possibilities of the incarnation or embodiment of God in the other-than-human world. Cobb uses the example of the history of art to show how Christ, rather than being dismissed, became immanent in art and the everyday world when his literal figure disappeared. All humanity becomes Christified and thus “inherently worthy of attention” (Christ in a Pluralistic Age, 38). I’d like to expand Cobb’s thesis beyond artistic portrayals of Christ and Christic humanity to include the aesthetic sensibilities of naturalists such as John Muir. Muir believed that the God of Christians could not be contained to traditional Christian sources and that, in fact, nature was a more immediate revelation of God than scripture or traditional theology. This paper will reflect on one letter in particular, written by Muir, which embeds Christ and literal Christic reference into the non-human world of the Sequoia tree. Here, in an ebullient and whimsical style Muir creatively blurs the Sequoia with Christ. Therefore, where Cobb argues that artists Christified all humanity, I argue that Muir Christifies the non-human.
Another important interlocutor in this project will be Jacques Derrida. Given Muir’s curious blending of traditionally Christic images of sovereignty with the non-human (“Lord Sequoia”), Derrida’s reflections on bestiality and sovereignty (converging in divinanimality; see The Animal That Therefore I Am, 132) will be an important constructive and critical voice. In emphasizing the role of logocentrism for maintaining a strict human/non-human divide Derrida raises a critical question of the Christian dependence on the logos for incarnation. However, I will propose that divinanimality also provides a constructive opportunity for rethinking a view of Christian incarnation which does not depend on an human/non-human hierarchical divide. Inspired by Muir’s Lord Sequoia, I propose a view of Christ as limitrophic/chimeric/seraphic. Here Christ is not only aligned with creative transformation (Cobb) but furthermore with that which has been deemed—like both Golgotha and wilderness—simultaneously necessary and excluded/sacrificed for the founding of “humanity” and “humane society.”
