| Chapter 1: | An Introduction to Polarity, Ambiguity, and Kinship |
|
|
ostensibly thick ontological divide. I argue in this book that a variety of kinship persists in the thick of interspecies communication, where it is possible for scientists to ‘speak fluent rat’ and for rats to communicate in terms that are readily understandable to humans. In the thickness of the interaction that flows across human/animal and speci-al borders persists a relatedness that has been of interest to phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty (1963, 1964, 1968, 1994), whose insights I use in order to analyse the fleshy register of relatedness I encountered in the lab. As Merleau-Ponty observed in his 1964 work, a fleshy unspecificity (i.e., the way in which bodies in general ‘share a world’) already persists between humans and animals in the sense that the world is shared among and generally available to the species, despite their evident differences, in the weight of their bodies and the fleshiness of their existence. Merleau-Ponty (1994) described this fleshy sharing of the world as ‘strange kinship’. In such a kinship persists a ‘we’—not the ‘double we’ that Despret (2008, p. 123) despaired over that separates animals from humans, but a unitary one, one that roots fleshy experience in a singular and universal common ground and posits animals and humans as ‘variants’ of the same sensible-sensing corporeality as humans.
I also turn to some ostensibly unlikely sources to explore this register of kinship, such as Agamben’s The Open of 2002. In The Open, Agamben hinted—perhaps not intentionally (see Calarco, 2008)—at the undoing of the Great Divide between humans and animals when he suggested that the zone of indistinction of his original conception of bare life (1998) might be reconceptualised as a zone of possibility, within which the relations between humans and animals might be reworked. In a zone where humans and animals become biopolitically and discursively indistinct from one another, there might persist a kinship of indistinction, born not of the biological likeness of bodies but rather in the persistence of ambiguous unspecificity (i.e., not in a species category, moreover, not in hierarchical relation to one another) where, as Haraway (2008) suggested, ‘no one gets to be Man’ (p. 82). These fleshy and indistinctive registers of kinship were also recognised by the scientists in this study, and they served to connect the scientists with those rodent research