| Chapter 1: | An Introduction to Polarity, Ambiguity, and Kinship |
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based primarily on generation, descent, and shared DNA but instead in repeated proclamations of kinship through actions, gestures, claims, and words. I add to this insight that it is equally present in a constant unfolding of gestural interplay. I turn to examine this way of seeing kinship by making recourse to the insights Merleau-Ponty made into the relations between animals and humans. In this book, then, I examine forms of kinship that rely on biological relatedness and forms of kinship that depend on transivity and contingency between different species, which were manifested in the fleshy relationships that rodent research animals and human scientists made with one another in their interactions in the laboratory space.
Even when theoreticians point to the distance between animals and humans, the language of kinship is not absent. From Heidegger’s suggestion that animals may seem like kin but in terms of world formation could not be less related to humans emerged his abyssal kinship (1998). This is a concept which (although he intentionally undermined it) he used to point to the ways in which humans and animals (only) appear to be related to one another, as kin:
It was against this abyssal kinship that Merleau-Ponty (1994) argued that the ‘thickness’ of flesh, which constitutes and is constituted by the world people share, ensures kin-like relations. The differences in style of encountering and engaging with the world (e.g., rat style, mouse style, human style) distinguish our different experiences. Flesh makes communication possible because it is reversible, in that all beings are sensing and sensible—this enables intercorporeal being and founds transivity between bodies, including between animal and human bodies.