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A N I M A L S …
I n  t h e  f u l l n e s s  o f  o u r  n o n i d e n t i t i e s …
S t e p h e n  D a v i d  R o s s *
I come to speak not of the animals.
Whence do I come, and toward what?
To whom do I speak, and in what voice?
If not the animals, then of which?
If the animals do not speak, what do they say?
In what gathering do we come together?
I come to speak with you from two well known places. Let me re-
mind you of them.
First:
We no longer derive man from “the spirit” or “the deity”; we have placed 
him back among the animals…. Man is by no means the crown of creation: 
every living being stands beside him on the same level of perfection. And even 
this is saying too much: relatively speaking, man is the most bungled of all the 
animals, the sickliest, and not one has strayed more dangerously from its in-
stincts. But for all that, he is of course the most interesting. (Nietzsche, A, 580)
To which I might ask, why of course, why not perhaps?
Second:
The moral question is thus not, nor has it ever been: should one eat or 
not eat, eat this and not that, the living or the nonliving, man or animal, but 
since one must eat in any case … how for goodness’ sake should one eat well? 
… “One must eat well [il faut bien manger]” does not mean above all taking 
in and grasping in itself, but learning and giving to eat, learning-to-give-the- 
other-to-eat. … It is a rule offering infinite hospitality. …1 (Derrida, EW, 
282-3)
To which I might ask, what hospitality for chick or calf, what do we 
give, what do they learn? And what makes it infinite except our pre-
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sumption? What could make it infinite but our forbearance? And if we 
withdrew from sacrificing animals so readily to our digestion, might the 
next step be to withdraw from sacrificing each other to our goodness?
More of this later.
We who believe in evolution—and which of us animals today does 
not, perhaps even those who would deny it?—have returned human-
ity to the animals, to nature. Human beings together with animals and 
plants compose living nature, where every species has achieved the same 
degree of perfection from the standpoint of evolutionary fitness. We 
may be capable of killing other animals, and of inventing new species 
of plants, but that capacity might be a defect in being—if such a thing 
could be said to be.
As for eating—I am a committed vegetarian—we cannot choose not 
to eat, that would be to choose not to live or be, and we cannot limit 
eating to grasping and chewing, but may include all the ways in which 
we give and receive, in the proximities of our shared being in the world 
together—I mean, beings, worlds, singularities, and participations. Let 
us think of these as defining what we mean by proximities. And let us 
note that when we are together with animals, when we approach the ani-
mals and the others with the task of learning-to-give-to-them through 
the mouth (not to mention other orifices, not to forget infinite hospital-
ity), we are speaking of the endless ways of expressing and responding 
that constitute hospitality.
Let me begin again with some hypothetical yet tangible examples:
You are sitting on the sofa in your living room, your three-year-old son in your 
lap, together with your 12-year-old cat, your dog beside you. You feel the warmth of 
each of their bodies touching yours and touching each other, and you are aware of 
your humanity in the bodies touching. You are watching Animal Planet, an episode 
about jaguars living and hunting. It seems to you that the animals are present in 
your room, though you know that that is possible only in virtue of exceptional 
camera technology. You know you are safe, and you feel that you are closer to such 
animals than you have ever been before. While you are watching you become aware 
that your cat has pounced on moths drifting into the room.
You take your five-year-old daughter to the zoo and stop at the jaguar exhibit. 
The jaguar is pacing like a crazy person, back and forth, round and round. You are 
about 60 feet away, and cannot get closer. You wonder what it would be like to be 
the jaguar in such a cage. And you think you know.
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You are walking through the forest, aware of the singing of the birds, the move-
ments of small animals, your family at your side. An outing together, you say to 
each other, let’s go for a walk in the woods. You are lucky to live near a forest that 
is kept as wild as possible except for a few dirt paths. The coyotes have come back 
and deer are visible at certain hours of the day.
You are standing on a precipice looking out over rice fields below in Bali. In the 
darkness you can see the stars before you and up into the sky. In the darkness you can 
see the stars before you and below, all the way down. The stars below are moving. 
The entire world is full of moving stars. You realize that the lights below are fireflies.
Many of these are familiar experiences, though the last may no longer 
be familiar to city dwellers. I offer them to call attention to what might 
be strange about them. Let me begin with the second.
In his novel, Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee presents a famous older 
woman author who has written a novel on Molly Bloom regarded as 
comparable if not superior to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Already a remarkable 
suggestion. She is invited to speak throughout the world on any topic 
she chooses. Although her hosts would like her to speak on literature, 
she chooses to speak on the treatment of animals on factory farms, com-
paring it with the treatment of Jews in German concentration camps. 
The dinners that celebrate her present a difficult social relation. What 
shall they eat? What shall they discuss? Who will be offended?
Lest we pass by too easily, let me note the bodily elements of this pic-
ture: animals in cages, in their odiferous presence; animals screaming at 
slaughter; blood, skin, intestines, and bone; human beings confined to 
barracks, fed sickening rations, sickened by work, cold, unfitting clothes 
and shoes, suffused with indifferent hatreds and brutalities. One might 
speculate that the corporealities and the brutalities here have much in 
common, in contrast to my first and second examples, in which the 
warmth and love that define the best that human life can experience are 
profoundly corporeal. This is to say that despite a world of traditions in 
which the highest joys that humans can know involve diminishing the 
tangible weight of physical experiences, those same traditions and lives 
know that the fullness of being for humans and animals, if not plants 
and other wonderful things, is unmistakably corporeal. I would say that 
this is a lesson we may learn from Darwin and evolutionary biology. We 
may learn it, but many would refuse it.
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One of Elizabeth Costello’s themes—offensive to some—is that 
rational discourses such as science and philosophy are incapable of 
addressing issues of extreme suffering and evil. Concentration camps 
and factory farming are too intense for abstract reason to address. 
Reason has no monopoly on ethical compassion, and indeed is a human 
invention for human purposes.
Might it not be that the phenomenon we are examining here is, rather 
than the flowering of a faculty that allows access to the secrets of the universe, 
the specialism of a rather narrow self-regenerating intellectual tradition whose 
forte is reasoning, in the same way that the forte of chess players is playing 
chess, which for its own motives it tries to install at the centre of the universe? 
(Coetzee, EC, 69)
A second theme, in close proximity to the first, is that literature, es-
pecially poetry, can express the inner being of strange and unfamiliar 
things, for example, wild animals and dead people.
Here is that jaguar again, twice, in the eyes and voice of a poet:
The jaguar
[skipping the beginning]
By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear—He spins from the bars, 
but there’s no cage to him
More than to the visionary his cell:
His stride is wildernesses of freedom:
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel. Over the cage floor the 
horizons come.
–Ted Hughes
Second glance at a jaguar
Skinful of bowls he bowls them,
The hip going in and out of joint, dropping the spine with the urgency of 
his hurry
Like a cat going along under thrown stones, under cover,
Glancing sideways, running
Under his spine….
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At every stride he has to turn a corner
In himself and correct it. His head
Is like the worn down stump of another whole jaguar, His body is just 
the engine shoving it forward,
Lifting the air up and shoving on under,
The weight of his fangs hanging the mouth open,
Bottom jaw combing the ground.
–Ted Hughes (quoted from Mulhall, WA, 111-2)
Here is a magician-philosopher’s poetic expression of our third ex-
perience:
Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host 
of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all 
too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix 
of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in deli-
cate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate 
earth—our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears 
are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honk-
ing of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our 
lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is 
to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coher-
ence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not hu-
man. (Abram, SS, 22)
Ultimately, to acknowledge the life of the body, and to affirm our solidarity 
with this physical form, is to acknowledge our existence as one of the earth’s 
animals, and so to remember and rejuvenate the organic basis of our thoughts 
and our intelligence. (47)
Ultimately, then, it is not the human body alone but rather the whole of 
the sensuous world that provides the deep structure of language. As we our-
selves dwell and move within language, so, ultimately, do the other animals and 
animate things of the world; if we do not notice them there, it is only because 
language has forgotten its expressive depths. “Language is a life, is our life and 
the life of the things… .” It is no more true that we speak than that the things, 
and the animate world itself, speak within us. (87)
And the fourth:
Between the constellations below and the constellations above drifted 
countless fireflies, their lights flickering like the stars, some drifting up to join 
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the clusters of stars overhead, others, like graceful meteors, slipping down from 
above to join the constellations underfoot, and all these paths of light upward 
and downward were mirrored, as well, in the still surface of the paddies. I felt 
myself at times falling through space, at other moments floating and drifting. 
I simply could not dispel the profound vertigo and giddiness; the paths of 
the fireflies, and their reflections in the water’s surface, held me in a sustained 
trance. Even after I crawled back to my hut and shut the door on this whirl-
ing world, I felt that now the little room in which I lay was itself floating free 
of the earth. (4)
Elizabeth Costello’s description of this being-in-our-body is presented 
in relation to a bat—the bat made famous in Thomas Nagel’s sugges-
tion that we cannot imagine ourselves as a bat. Our finite beings in our 
finite bodies make it impossible for us to imagine being so other: sens-
ing, hearing, living like a bat; sensing, smelling, being a dog; perhaps 
unable to imagine being my lover whose body is so intimately close to 
me. All bodies, perhaps, are intimate and other. The other who I love, 
whose otherness I may or may not imagine, is other in the proximity of 
our bodies, same and other bodies. Tout autre est tout autre. (Derrida, 
GD, 68)
Elizabeth Costello confronts us with two different suggestions, if you 
will, concerning being in a body, always in different bodies, human and 
bat: that poets can so imagine, and that what they imagine is bat being, 
bats and jaguars full of being in their bodies, a notion she expands on 
without attribution, drawing from Spinoza’s beatitudo: unbounded joy.
To be a living bat is to be full of being; being fully a bat is like being fully 
human, which is also to be full of being. Bat being in the first case; human be-
ing in the second, maybe; but those are secondary considerations. To be full 
of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being 
is joy. (EC, 77)
By bodying forth the jaguar, Hughes shows us that we too can embody 
animals—by the process called poetic invention that mingles breath and sense 
in a way that no one has explained and no one ever will. He shows us how to 
bring the living body into being within ourselves. When we read the jaguar 
poem, when we recollect it afterwards in tranquillity, we are for a brief while 
the jaguar. He ripples within us, he takes over our body, he is us. (97-8)
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The particular horror of the camps, the horror that convinces us that what 
went on there was a crime against humanity, is not that despite a humanity 
shared with their victims, the killers treated them like lice. That is too abstract. 
The horror is that the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their 
victims, as did everyone else. They said, “It is they in those cattle cars rattling 
past.” They did not say, “How would it be if it were I in that cattle car?” They 
did not say, “It is I who am in that cattle car.” They said, “It must be the dead 
who are being burned today, making the air stink and falling in ash on my 
cabbages.” They did not say, “How would it be if I were burning?” They did 
not say, “I am burning, I am falling in ash.” (79)
I share some of Nagel’s misgivings as to whether our imagination is 
capable of identifying with the auditory world of a bat or any other crea-
ture that lives by echolocation; I am struck by how different is the world 
of a dog who lives primarily by smell. This awe—yes awe—I feel is not 
to denigrate the bat or dog but to the contrary, to celebrate their other-
ness, the otherness of their worlds. We share worlds together, in some 
sense we share the same worlds together, and yet here are two beings 
whose worlds are wonderfully different. One of these animals is capable 
of sharing our human worlds more fully than many other people. Dogs 
are famous for reading the minds and souls of humans by reading their 
bodies, however they do that.
All this might be to say that I do not accept Heidegger’s insistence 
that animals are poor in world.2 Poor perhaps in ways that certain hu-
mans are poor in human worlds, but astonishingly rich in animal worlds, 
in ways that human beings can only dimly imagine.
I have misgivings about the reach of our imaginations in certain en-
deavors, yet I wish to celebrate our imaginations as Elizabeth Costello 
asks us to. Imagination—not only human, perhaps—is limited yet un-
bounded. We cannot imagine just anything, yet we cannot suppose that 
anything is beyond imagining. That peculiar paradox of imagining is the 
key to literature and art, if not to what makes us human. Except that 
we must not suppose that we know that such imagining is restricted to 
humans.
But this is not what interests me here. I am interested in another sto-
ry present in what Elizabeth Costello says. What is it to be full of being? 
And can we imagine fullness of being in another human or animal, even 
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a plant or stone, without denigration—in her words, without implying 
that such others, with less fullness or a different fullness, are ours to use 
in any way whatever.3
I have intimated that this fullness of being is corporeal, we live in 
our bodies, and bodily living is the fullness of being. The limits of phi-
losophy, then, and of any other mode of thought as such, is given by 
the abstractions such thought imposes on us—very strong, overwhelm-
ing in philosophy. The greatness and weakness of philosophy lie in the 
power of its abstractions.
Fullness of being, then, is the abundance of being in a body. Bod-
ies are proximate, relational, embedded, and entangled. Embodiment 
is relationality. Indeed, bodies are so embedded and entangled that we 
are constantly surprised by what emerges from such bodily relations. I 
would call that process of emergence evolution. In Spinoza’s words, “we 
do not know what bodies can do.” (E, Pt. 3, P2, Sch.)
This surprise does not entail miscomprehension or distance alone, 
for we are frequently surprised even more by how intimate and affec-
tive other bodies are. Fullness of being, then, is inherently strange and 
unfamiliar, in the midst of kinship and love.
This disparition pervades the physical world. I say this aware that 
Enlightenment thought has made the science of physics the model of 
clarity and certainty. More of this later. Here I want to call attention 
to the pervasiveness of what cannot be said (in philosophy or science) 
without difficulty (in Cora Diamond’s words), what cannot be under-
stood, because it is itself, inherently, difficult to understand, difficult 
to be (Diamond, DRDP). In other words, what we may learn from the 
proximities and intimacies of animals (and others, including those we 
love) is the strange difficulty of being. Being in a body is strange and 
difficult. Being as a body also. Being a mind, a soul, a being fully pres-
ent in a body that is present somehow to itself, and thereby present to 
others, is inconceivably strange.
I am suggesting that this strangeness pervades the world. I am sug-
gesting that all that we take to be beings as such are present strangely 
and difficultly to themselves. Every identity is nonidentical with itself, 
and present to itself nonidentically. I call this betraying. It is the ongo-
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ing condition of the enchantment of the world, beyond accounting. 
More of this later.
Returning to fullness and denigration:
Fullness of being is being in a body, embedded and entangled with 
other bodies. In this way, the denigration of other bodies is interrupted 
by the ways in which these other bodies are me, ways in which I am en-
tangled among them.
John Donne said this several centuries ago in Europe: no one is an 
island, entire to itself. Buddhism describes it as emptiness, sunyata, with-
out complete and separate self identity. Western individuality promotes 
a myth of self ownership in the context of a capitalist world of labor 
and consumption in which individuals are as they produce and as they 
consume. If we add the presence of others—individual bodies betrayed 
in who they are by others, other bodies and other things, historical and 
relational—the picture expands to make identity impossible in itself, 
nonidentical with itself.
The fullness of being is its nonidentity with itself. Every being betrays 
itself, and betrays the others; every identity is nonidentical with itself, is 
what it is in virtue of others. We are embedded in the being of others, 
as they are embedded in ours. In our bodies we are full of other bodies, 
however strange and difficult this may be.
To denigrate an other—animal, human, and others—is to denigrate 
ourselves. Each of us is so embodied, so embedded, entangled among 
others in our bodies, that we are what and who we are in virtue of what 
and who they are. We can elevate ourselves only by diminishing the full-
ness of our own identities.
This means that the fullness of my being is embodied in the fullness 
of yours. What I might gain in elevation I lose in the resulting attenu-
ation of our shared being.4
Here is a well-known example:5
Levinas uses the Kantian expression “friend of man” in order to designate 
the dog that is capable of transcendence. It is a question of the dogs of Egypt, 
which are thunderstruck at the moment of the “death of the firstborn,” when 
“Israel is about to be released from the house of bondage.” You will hear how 
the dog, which is still in lack and privation, as Heidegger will decidedly say, 
“without,” still lacking the logos and ethics, “with neither ethics nor logos,” in 
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Levinas’s words, sees itself convoked, in its very silence, as a witness, simply as 
witness to the humanity of man. This mute witness is there merely to attest to 
the dignity (Würde) of man. (Derrida, ATTIA, 116-7)
No one is more corporeal than Levinas, no one more ethical. And yet 
he cannot think himself into the being of an animal, neither in general 
nor in the particular case of Bobby, the famous dog whose presence in 
the camp was to acknowledge the humanity of the prisoners.
The dignity of man is said to elevate humanity above all other crea-
tures and things in the world. Yet this Kantian claim, no matter how 
elevated, carries with it a profound destitution of being. Certain traits 
and not others define the dignity of man—not to mention how long 
and in what ways dignity has been withheld from women.
What would it mean if we granted dignity to all things—not rights 
but dignity, self identity and self realization, with the proviso that not 
only the being but the identity and the realization are nonidentical with 
themselves? This is to say that the fullness of their being means to me 
as a body that I can never realize the fullness of my being except in re-
lation to them, through their fullness; and not in any predetermined 
way. The fullness of being opens onto the difficulty of being nonidenti-
cal with oneself.
This can be said in the language of bodies and animality—first 
Levinas again:
But is not the diachrony of the inspiration and expiration separated by the 
instant that belongs to an animality? Would animality be the openness upon 
the beyond essence? But perhaps animality is only the soul’s still being too 
short of breath. In human breathing, in its everyday equality, perhaps we have 
to already hear the breathlessness of an inspiration that paralyzes essence, that 
transpierces it with an inspiration by the other, an inspiration that is already 
expiration, that “rends the soul”! It is the longest breath there is, spirit. Is man 
not the living being capable of the longest breath in inspiration, without a 
stopping point, and in expiration, without return? (Levinas, OB, 181-2)
Let us think within a certain European tradition of this conjunction 
of inspiration, transcendence, and breath as spirit, together with dignity, 
subjectivity, and humanity. The key term in this passage is animality, 
first as the corporeality of humanity—but not its inspiration—second 
as the brutality of the natural world—or, what may be the same thing 
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again, its indifference. Nature is red in tooth and claw. Evil belongs to hu-
manity alone. No creature is as destructive as human beings. We are higher 
than our animality.
Except, as Nietzsche says, we are our animality. We are our bodies. 
Bodies are us. In all their transcendence. The miracle of humans is the 
miracle of bodies.6 And the miracle of bodies is not only human.
It seems that we are always asked to take sides where there are no 
sides. The side of humanity, the side of animals, the side of goodness, 
the side of death. We must know, we must believe, we must take a stand. 
As if these existed except in the subjunctive. Each of them nonidenti-
cal with itself.
Here, in the name of taking sides, Derrida has something remarkable 
to say. On the sides, then, of life and death—let us call this the fullness 
of living.
Hélène Cixous took sides “for life.” This is not an obvious thing to do, un-
like what one might imagine. The side [parti] is also a wager [pari], an act of 
faith. What does it mean to wager one’s life on life? What will the choice of 
life have meant for her? Not a “life-choice,” but the side of life against death, 
for life without death, beyond a death whose test and threat are none the less 
endured, in mourning even in the life blood and breath, in the soul of writ-
ing. (Derrida, HCL, xiii)
The fullness of living takes place in the subjunctive.
As for me, I keep forever reminding her each time, on my side, that we die 
in the end, too quickly. And I always have to begin again.
For she—because she loves to live—does not believe me. She, on her side, 
knows well that one dies in the end, too quickly; she knows it and writes about 
it better than anyone, she has the knowledge of it but she believes none of it. 
She does not believe, she knows; she is the one who knows and who tries, but 
she believes none of it. (2)
On one side, this beginning leads toward the subjunctive mood of 
believing: would that I (or we) might believe—a mood that teeters on 
the edge of the deepest abyss (if there be such). On another side, this 
beginning leads toward enchanting, a term, like betraying, that plunges 
into the abyss without fear of dying. If that be possible.
By enchanting I mean to evoke Max Weber’s suggestion a century 
ago that the world has become disenchanted, that we believe (but not 
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in the subjunctive) that we can account for all things by rationality and 
calculation (Weber, SV, 155). Might the fullness of being be enchanting, 
in the subjunctive, full of unaccountable things?
Derrida—jd—insists that hc’s writing is en-chanting, that literature 
can be en-chanting, in the face of dying, on the side of living, if that be 
possible, if that be not the impossible. Or unbelievable. Always in the 
subjunctive.
How would the mighty powers of this unbelievable belief in the impossible 
watch over what is called so glibly the fiction of a so-called literary event, over 
all that complies with the modality of a certain “as if ”? And as each art enter-
tains a different experience of fiction and therefore of belief, one may wonder 
what happens to believing and to the “would that I might believe” when arts 
graft, haunt, and mingle with one another. … When one hears a piece of mu-
sic, if one can hear it, for instance a song [chant], an “enchanting chant [en-
chant],” as is said in a text about magical enchantment, a hymn or incantation 
of which we will have more to say, then one believes or one no longer needs 
to believe in the same way as someone who would only hear the words of a 
narrative (whether fictional or not). What happens then, as far as belief and 
the impossible are concerned, when the song of the enchanting chant [chant 
de l’enchant] can no longer be dissociated from the whole body of words and 
from what still presents itself as the literality of literature? When literature be-
comes an enchanting chant? (Derrida, HC, 4-5)
I might ask—perhaps—why literature (alone?) can become an en-
chanting chant. What would it mean to insist or to deny this?—that it 
can, that only it can. Perhaps as if it might. And why not music?
What happens when anything, literature or music, philosophy or 
poem, becomes enchanting? I responded in detail to this question else-
where.7 Enchanting expresses what is unaccountable, miraculous, with-
out a name. Neither the name of a god for what is beyond accounting, 
nor the name of a science for what is perhaps not beyond. The noni-
dentity of every identity with itself. Enchanting is betraying. Bodies are 
enchanting. Whatever is enchanting is bodies, bodies are full of being, 
embodied and embedded and entangled among themselves, always as if 
perhaps beyond themselves.
In hc’s name, jd says the following:
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As I accumulate the false steps and false starts to begin with, I will say at 
least that not only do I no longer know which side I am on and from which 
side I am about to speak (neither from hers nor from mine), not only do I no 
longer know what a side is (for example, as they say, the side of life or the side 
of death), but above all I do not know whom I name or call when I say “she” 
or “her.” How to speak of her? How not to do so? How to avoid her? (21)
In the name of animals, he says something similar:
The deconstruction that matters to me here should also promote itself in 
the name of another history, another concept of history, and of the history of 
the human as well as that of reason. An immense history, a macro- and mi-
crohistory. [The history, but also something much more, that is—] The sim-
plisticness, misunderstanding, and violent disavowal that we are analyzing at 
present also seem to me to be betrayals of repressed human possibilities, of 
other powers of reason, of a more comprehensive logic of argument, of a more 
demanding responsibility concerning the power of questioning and response, 
concerning science as well, and, for example—but this is only an example—as 
regards the most open and critical forms of zoological or ethological knowl-
edge. (Derrida, ATTIA, 104)
As always I would emphasize the bodies.
I would bring the themes of enchanting, believing, and betraying to-
gether in the subjunctive form of a thesis: these may perhaps express the 
fullness of being in the proximities of bodies. The fullness of being in an-
imal bodies, and other bodies, can be expressed only subjunctively. The 
double meaning of might expresses the intensities and the subjunctivi-
ties of bodies in the abundance of being. Finally, then, the subjunctive 
forms in which bodies are embodied and embedded, the entanglements 
of bodies among themselves, are also expressed in the subjunctive. For 
example, believing includes brain cells and iron atoms and who knows 
what else? In the fullness of being we are not who we are except insofar 
as we are something else, and we are intimately entangled together. This 
enables us to cross over to them in imagination. It enables this crossing 
subjunctively.
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I believe who I am
I believe I know who I am
I believe I believe who I am
I may believe I may know who and what you are… who and what I 
am… who and what the world is that we share.
I come to conclusion with two other voices. First, Cora Diamond 
again:
What is expressed [in the poem from Ted Hughes] is the sense of a dif-
ficulty that pushes us beyond what we can think. To attempt to think it is to 
feel one’s thinking come unhinged. Our concepts, our ordinary life with our 
concepts, pass by this difficulty as if it were not there; the difficulty, if we try 
to see it, shoulders us out of life, is deadly chilling. (DRDP, 56)
[Yet] what is capable of astonishing one in its incomprehensibility, its not 
being fittable in with the world as one understands it, may be seen by others 
as unsurprising. (60)
Elizabeth Costello, in Coetzee’s first lecture, speaks of her own knowledge 
of death, in a passage which (in the present context) takes us to the “contra-
dictory permanent horrors” spoken of in Hughes’s poem. “For an instant at 
a time,” she says, “I know what it is like to be a corpse. The knowledge repels 
me. It fills me with terror; I shy away from it, refuse to entertain it.” She goes 
on to say that we all have such moments, and that the knowledge we then have 
is not abstract but embodied.
“For a moment we are that knowledge. We live the impossible: we live be-
yond our death, look back on it, yet look back as only a dead self can.” She goes 
on, making the contradiction explicit: “What I know is what a corpse cannot 
know: that it is extinct, that it knows nothing and will never know anything 
anymore. For an instant, before my whole structure of knowledge collapses in 
panic, I am alive inside that contradiction, dead and alive at the same time” 
(32). The awareness we each have of being a living body, being “alive to the 
world,” carries with it exposure to the bodily sense of vulnerability to death, 
sheer animal vulnerability, the vulnerability we share with them. This vulner-
ability is capable of panicking us. To be able to acknowledge it at all, let alone 
as shared, is wounding; but acknowledging it as shared with other animals, in 
the presence of what we do to them, is capable not only of panicking one but 
also of isolating one, as Elizabeth Costello is isolated. Is there any difficulty in 
seeing why we should not prefer to return to moral debate, in which the liv-
ingness and death of animals enter as facts that we treat as relevant in this or 
that way, not as presences that may unseat our reason? (71-2)
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I cannot repeat too often that the presences that may unseat our rea-
son are embedded bodies, that we—and others—who inhabit bodies ex-
perience difficulties of reality in virtue of living in our bodies with other 
bodies, that the fullness of being that we and animals and who knows 
what else experience and live may well be—even cows placidly chewing 
in the field—something of a difficulty that can only be subjunctively, 
because it is never just what it is.
I conclude with a different subjunctive, where the fullness of bodily 
language meets the fullness of love. The lips that speak are the lips that 
love, as if to believe that loving and speaking might be the same while 
always different, because of the bodily orifices they caress.
We are luminous. Neither one nor two. I’ve never known how to count. … 
An odd sort of two. And yet not one. Especially not one.
But how can I put “I love you” differently? I love you, my indifferent one? 
(Irigaray, WOLST, 207)
I love you: our two lips cannot separate to let just one word pass. (208)
How can I put I love you differently in the subjunctive? which is to 
say that love is never identical with itself.
Irigaray’s famous if not notorious words, so often taken in the de-
clarative—there are only men and women—cry out in the subjunctive. 
As does the universal.
I am, therefore, a political militant for the impossible, which is not to say 
a utopian. Rather, what I want is yet to be as the only possibility of a future. 
(ILTY, 10)
Without doubt, the most appropriate content for the universal is sexual 
difference. Indeed, this content is both real and universal. Sexual difference is 
an immediate natural given and it is a real and irreducible component of the 
universal. The whole of human kind is composed of women and men and of 
nothing else. The problem of race is, in fact, a secondary problem—except 
from a geographic point of view?—which means we cannot see the wood for 
the trees, and the same goes for other cultural diversities—religious, economic, 
and political ones.
Sexual difference probably represents the most universal question we can 
address. Our era is faced with the task of dealing with this issue, because, across 
the whole world, there are, there are only, men and women.
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The culture of this universal is yet to be. The individual has been consid-
ered as a particular without an adequate interpretation of the universal that is 
in her or him: woman or man. (47-8)
What kind of universal, what fullness of being, is waiting for us in the 
subjunctive? Other words and other holocausts, all subjunctive.
To each wounding separation, I would answer by refusing the holocaust 
while silently affirming, for myself and for the other, that the most intimate 
perception of the flesh escapes every sacrificial substitution, every assimilation 
into discourse, every surrender to the God. Scent or premonition between my 
self and the other, this memory of the flesh as the place of approach means 
ethical fidelity to incarnation. To destroy it is to risk the suppression of alter-
ity, both the God’s and the other’s. Thereby dissolving any possibility of access 
to transcendence. (ESD, 217)
Betray the subjunctive. Refuse the holocaust. Sacrifice sacrifice. En-
chant disenchantment.
* Stephen David Ross is Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy, Interpretation, and 
Culture and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University, State University of New York, 
and Alfred North Whitehead Fellow at the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland.
227
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N o t e s
1 The complete passage is as follows:
 The moral question is thus not, nor has it ever been: should one eat or not eat, eat this and 
not that, the living or the nonliving, man or animal, but since one must eat in any case and since 
it is and tastes good to eat, and since there’s no other definition of the good [du bien], how for 
goodness’ sake should one eat well [bien manger]? And what does this imply? What is eating? 
How is this metonymy of introjection to be regulated? And in what respect does the formulation 
of these questions in language give us still more food for thought? In what respect is the ques-
tion, if you will, still carnivorous? The infinitely metonymical question on the subject of “one 
must eat well” must be nourishing not only for me, for a “self,” which would thus eat badly; 
it must be shared, as you might put it, and not only in language. “One must eat well [il faut 
bien manger]” does not mean above all taking in and grasping in itself, but learning and giving 
to eat, learning-to-give-the-other-to-eat. One never eats entirely on one’s own: this constitutes 
the rule underlying the statement, “One must eat well.” It is a rule offering infinite hospitality. 
(Derrida, EW, 282-3)
2 Discussed at length in Derrida, OS, 11-2 and ATTIA, 144-5.
3 Spinoza’s words again, around whom all these words circulate. (Spinoza, E, Pt. 4, App. 
XXVI)
4 This is famously expressed in the master slave dialectic in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 
but it is at the heart of domination. My world is diminished by what I do to diminish yours.
5 The dog, of course, is Bobby, from Levinas, ND.
6 See Whitehead, PR, 339.
7 See my E.
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