Carlos Monsiváis is hard to pin down. He is a chronicler of every aspect of Mexican reality past and present; A cultural critic focusing on poetry, film, art, and music; and an erudite essayist committed to the connections between elite and popular cultures. His style is both acerbic and festive in ways that epitomize the Mexican character, and nothing escapes his incisive curiosity: the cult of national heroes that finds its twin in the society of spectacle, the cultural migrations between television talk and devotional discourse, the mass movements that advance and recede in a welter of democratic projects. As an intellectual, Carlos Monsiváis is unique in (and to) Mexico. You cannot walk in this country without seeing or hearing him on every street corner, nor can you open a book without sensing his influence. His presence is so omnímoda—so omnimodal—that we no longer know which came first: Mexican culture as Monsiváis observes it, or Monsiváis observing Mexican culture.

A “zoontology” is currently uncovering the productive difficulty that animals bring to philosophy. in essays in a volume by leading philosophers entitled Philosophy and Animal Life, the contours of the challenge that animals pose to philosophy emerge from discussion of, among other texts, J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals, where both rational argumentation and poetic invention are (in Cora Diamond's inspired borrowing from Ted Hughes) “shouldered out”2 by the impossibility of comprehending and conveying everything that animal lives challenge us to recognize about our human selves. A long-standing response to that impossibility has been simply to declare the subject irrelevant or even—as Peter Shaffer's unhappy protagonist in Equus says—“nonsensical” (21). As that play glosses the role of animality in psychoanalysis, to put the horse before the boy is to violate the anthropocentric grammar of the normal. A similar assumption of animal irrelevance characterizes public culture, camouflaged by such ubiquitous and unexamined “animal-loving” practices as keeping pets and watching wildlife films.

In the last days of March 2007, the beautiful and captivating colombian city of medellín hosted an often bland yet, on this occasion, surprisingly media-appealing event: surrounded by a generous cohort of reporters, the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language was holding its regular conference, the thirteenth since its conception in 1951. The gathering began on the twenty-first and culminated three days later, at the Teatro Metropolitano, with what could arguably be described as one of the most highly publicized events in the history of the Spanish language: the official approval of the Nueva gramática de la lengua española ‘The New Grammar of the Spanish Language’ (henceforth NGLE). The Colombian president, Álvaro Uribe, and the head of the Spanish monarchy, King Juan Carlos I, presided over the ceremony, providing the occasion with the solemnity (and media pull) that it so critically required. After a series of opening remarks and speeches, the king stood, faced the academicians—one from Spain, one from the Philippines, and twenty from the Americas—and, as he called their names individually, asked, “¿Aprobáis la Nueva Gramática?” ‘Do you approve the New Grammar?‘ Each in turn, with a distinguished assembly of politicians, businessmen, and publishers as witnesses, rose and answered with a simple yet unequivocal “Sí.”

De-oedipalizing the Animal Other

The animal has ceased to be one of the privileged terms that indexes the european subject's relation to otherness. The metaphysics of otherness rested on an assumed political anatomy, implicitly modeled on ideals of whiteness, masculinity, normality, youth, and health. All other modes of embodiment, in the sense of both dialectical otherness (nonwhite, nonmasculine, nonnormal, nonyoung, nonhealthy) and categorical otherness (zoomorphic, disabled, or malformed), were pathologized and cast on the other side of normality—that is, viewed as anomalous, deviant, and monstrous. This morphological normativity was inherently anthropocentric, gendered, and racialized. It confirmed the dominant subject as much in what he included as his core characteristics as in what he excluded as other.

The past twenty years have seen a beauvoir revival in feminist theory. Feminist philosophers, political scientists, and historians of ideas have all made powerful contributions to our understanding of her philosophy, above all The Second Sex. Literary studies have lagged somewhat behind. Given that Beauvoir always defined herself as a writer rather than as a philosopher (Moi, Simone de Beauvoir 52–57), this is an unexpected state of affairs. Ursula Tidd's explanation is that Beauvoir's existentialism is theoretically incompatible with the poststructuralist trends that have dominated feminist criticism:

Let me take as my point of departure a question of genre, one raised in the realm of jurisprudence by the amicus brief—that is, the brief of the amicus curiae, or friend of the court: one who is not a party to a case but holds a pressing interest in it. I was drawn to the genre, most immediately, by a reading of the amicus briefs filed in the case of Lakhdar Boumediene et al. v. George W. Bush, which came before the United States Supreme Court on 5 December 2007 and raised the question of whether the detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, possessed the habeas corpus rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution.

In a New York Times editorial piece published in May 2007 about the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Darfur, Nicholas Kristof lamented, not for the first time, that people “aren't moved by genocide.” “The human conscience just isn't pricked by mass suffering,” Kristof continues, and yet, as both anecdotal evidence and scientific research have repeatedly shown, “an individual child (or puppy) in distress causes our hearts to flutter.” He recounts a series of psychological and sociological experiments that have borne out what he calls “the limits of rationality,” including the fact that people who hear narratives or see images that “prime the emotions” by focusing on the plight of an individual suffering creature—say, a baby or “a soulful dog in peril”—respond more vigorously to that suffering than those who have had their “rational side” primed by performing math problems. Perhaps, Kristof proposes in disgust, what the Darfur situation needs in order to achieve the public recognition it deserves—let alone to effect actual change—is not statistics of mass genocide but a very photogenic, if appropriately sad-eyed, poster child, “a suffering puppy with big eyes and floppy ears.” “If President Bush and the global public alike are unmoved by the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of fellow humans,” he despairingly concludes, “maybe our last, best hope is that we can be galvanized by a puppy in distress.”

In 1866 Emily Dickinson Ended a lapse of eighteen months in her correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson by sending him three lines that connect the major concerns of her work: death, subjectivity, and the conditions of knowledge. When Higginson later published these lines in “Emily Dickinson's Letters,” he explained that the poet would on occasion include “an announcement of some event, vast to her small sphere as this,” the death of her dog who had been her companion for sixteen years (450). In measuring Dickinson's loss biographically by the “small sphere” of her life, Higginson sets aside her ability to “wade grief” (Franklin 312) and situates her letter within the sentimental culture of pet keeping, which had transfigured a predominantly agricultural practice (pet initially referred to a lamb) into a staple of genteel domesticity and bourgeois subjectivity (Mason; Grier; Kete; Ritvo; Thomas). Far from participating uncritically in the roles and relations Higginson projects onto her, Dickinson interrogates the formation and gendering of sentimental subjectivity (Dillon; Blackwood) by placing “Carlo died” in relation to the other two lines—the signature and the call for instruction. “E. Dickinson” refers ambiguously to Emily or to her father, Edward Dickinson (Holland 146). The signature pluralizes the subject; it doubles and ultimately obscures “E.”'s gender. This ambiguous subject hinges on the animal's death as a scene of pedagogy: it stands in the liminal space between the announcement of Carlo's death and the request: “Would you instruct me now?”

The view that philosophers take of their art and craft changes when they remember that philosophy is not merely descriptive but is also performative. To use J. L. Austin's vocabulary, this change occurs when philosophers admit that their writings have illocutionary and perlocutionary, as well as locutionary, import. Any proposition is at once a judgment made by a thinking person and an expressive utterance presented to an audience; any argument is rational persuasion (even when it is quoted in a logic textbook). To speak with Stanley Cavell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, from their caravansaries along the trade route between Harvard and Cambridge, the change occurs when philosophers admit that their writings always take place in language games and forms of life, so that the search for criteria in framing concepts and for evidence in framing arguments is also a claim to community. Aristotle, more than two thousand years ago, urged similar insights and questions on philosophers when he wrote about rhetoric as an extension of logic and ethics. Filtered through the editorial work of Richard McKeon, the Aristotelian tradition at the University of Chicago produced books about practical deliberation that to my mind deserve at least as much attention as those of Cavell and Austin, works by Wayne Booth, Edward Levi, David Luban, Paul Kahn, and Eugene Garver. Notably, their texts deal with works of literature and of law, discursive realms in which narratives of human action are central and irreducible, however much they may be subject to philosophical analysis.

Grammar Games in the Classroom

It looked like an error of vocabulary. The class was reading a text by the east german author Thomas Brussig, Wasserfarben, and practicing the indirect discourse subjunctive. In the text, an East German school director, Schneider, summons a student to his office to reprimand him on his lack of motivation:

In the introduction to a 2002 special issue of diacritics on ethics and interdisciplinarity, mark sanders asks us to consider, “What points of contact, if any, are there between the current investment in ethics in literary theory, and the elaboration of ethics in contemporary philosophy?” (3). Yet the question behind this question—the one that motivates his selection of essays for the issue—is why literary critics and theorists have drawn their ideas about ethics from Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Alain Badiou but have felt little or no need to consult past or present moral philosophers. As Sanders goes on to note, while “in North America and the Anglophone world generally, the tendency in ethics has been to bring moral reflection to bear on questions in political theory,” there “has been relatively little attention among literary theorists to developments in disciplinary philosophy” (4).

My argument here is simple: that the problem of literary character can best be understood from the standpoint of animal studies, as an instance of broader philosophical and scientific problems in theorizing the human/animal divide.

In his recent film sicko, Michael Moore turns his attention to the crisis in medical care in the United States eventuated by the powerful and wealthy insurance and pharmaceutical companies that control how, when, and if patients experience the broad range of practices we call healing. Moore uses his familiar technique of visiting everyday people and recording their sometimes heartbreaking stories of illness, pitching these narratives against interviews with representatives from large corporations and government agencies.

In the ethics of ambiguity (1947), Simone De Beauvoir suggests that to be human is to be subject to change and contradiction. Paradox, she claimed, was the only truth concerning human existence because of the tension created between mortality and the desire to give meaning to life. “Death,” Beauvoir suggests, “challenges our existence. … [I]t also gives meaning to our life” (Prime 731). Unlike Albert Camus, however, she clearly refuses to conceive of existence as absurd. “To declare existence absurd is to deny that I can ever be given meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed” (Ethics 129). Recognizing the facticity created by the inevitability of death and the constraints death imposes on existence, she implores us, nevertheless, to seize our freedom and give meaning to it through ethical acts.