| Chapter 1: | An Introduction to Polarity, Ambiguity, and Kinship |
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This kinship erases neither difference nor similarity and makes animals and people neither identical nor separate; for Merleau-Ponty, animals and people are at once strangers and kin (see Oliver, 2007, p. 18). Alongside this fleshy kinship persists a mundane kinship, which is evident in the relations of caring in the laboratory. Mundane kinship, in Haraway’s (2008) language, is a kind of kinship that is forged in the recognition of speci-al difference and made evident in the care that is provided to species in the laboratory. It is based in nonanthropomorphic respect for animals and an attendance to the smallest details that make up specifically speci-al lives—this is a kinship that is forged between different species and arrayed in, at least in some ways, a nonhierarchical pattern.
Though I do attend to the kinship that manifests between humans and research animals in terms of substantive biogenetic relatedness, kinship is equally to be found in the way it is effectively lived in daily activity, and it is this ‘livedness’ (i.e., the act of living an experience that is largely unreflected upon) that also blurs those categorical divides between human and nonhuman in the laboratory setting. I look in this book at the everyday ‘livedness’ with animals that occurs in the lab as well as at the blurriness of and slippages across the divide that is ostensibly upheld in popular understandings of science involving animal subjects but not nearly so much in the living. How this ‘living’ is done in the future, within and between the categories of human and animal being, may be usefully speculated upon by turning, as I do in chapter 4 of this book, to the ways in which Agamben conceived of the world on the last day, in the messianic banquet of the righteous on the last day. Perhaps one will not have to wait quite so long as the end of the world for animals and humans to slip across the boundaries that even now might not separate them so firmly as some people believe, even (or perhaps especially) in the lab.
Speci-al and Mammalian Membership
The astute reader will probably have guessed that the categories of ‘mammal’ and ‘species’ are crucial to the ways in which rodent research