Well burrowed, old mole!

David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, Pantheon Books, New York 2010. 336 pp., $ 26.95 hb., 978 0 375 42171 6.

The history of the civilized human being has amounted to the sixth mass extinction event in the history of the planet earth.  How are we to respond? What to do in the face of the converging apocalypses, the darkening horizon of a failed form of life? The problem of civilization is daily (com)posing itself before our eyes; it is for us to respond by articulating the problem and by acting upon its conditions. Capitalism, as the latest representative of the civilized project, has a world in store, a world like the one Jean -Cristophe Bailly describes in his The Animal Side: 

…sky without birds, the oceans and rivers without fish, the earth without tigers or wolves, ice floes melted with humans below and nothing but humans fighting over water sources. Is it even possible to want that? In relation to this tendency, which seems ineluctable, every animal is a beginning, an engagement, a point of animation and intensity, a resistance. Any politics that takes no account of this (which is to say virtually all politics) is a criminal politics.

David Abram’s book inserts itself into this context; it is deeply sensitive to the horror of a totally human world, and it puts itself forward as an act of resistance to this suicidal ‘humanization.’

     Abram’s approach to the problem as he sees it is not immediately political;  instead, he claims that what is needed is a preparatory step, a thoroughgoing critique of the assumptions that enable the civilized project, and an articulation of a new language that corresponds to a new form of life. He calls this “a necessary work of recuperation that allows us to re-encounter the social and political”  Before we approach the problem, we need a new way of thinking that enacts our interbeing with the planet.  We need to forge a curious kind of thought that follows the perceptual logic of our interaction with the earth as living beings.  The articulation of this new language takes as its point of departure a pair of questions concerning the attribution of meaningful enunciation:

1. What if logos is not the exclusive property of man?

2. What if logos “is engendered by the difficult eros/tension between the our flesh and the flesh of the earth”?

Perhaps so long as the human being, good bourgeois that he has been, claims thought and intelligence, claims meaning as his private property we will have no meaningful progress on the environmental front.  It is necessary to break out of the circle of interiority that sees thought as property. Abram traces the genesis of this failed world-outlook, or this failure to out-look back to a primal act of violence that we can see exemplified in Cartesian modernity and cognitive science.  To this he counterposes Spinoza and Shamanism, forging a sort of materialist animism.  He also sees himself as “Completing the Copernican revolution” in a sense rather different from that of Kant. He wants to combine attunement to the earth with intellectual rigor.    

But is “perceptual logic” enough? Seems individualist like phenomenologies so often do.  It cannot be denied that this book is something of a confessional, a testimony of a single bourgeois who has seen the light, a feel-good book that proves that they are not all bad etc.