The Order of Animals

“This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that."

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970) xv.

(also in History of Sexuality and some interviews, on the emphasis on eating than sexual taboo)

Article: Woman in China roasts puppy alive
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/blogs/singaporescene/woman-roasted-puppy-alive-061603091.html

Hey,

read the sanctimonious comments. What about chickens, pigs, cows and fish? Your book should've been Dog Meat not Diced Meat to irritate more people. The order of animals: pandas, whales, sharks, dogs, cats, birds, chicken, cows... endangered species, pets, poultry, cattle. Barbaric because dogs did not move up to the category of Pets in some places. Houseflies, cockroaches and lizards remain within the category of Pests in most places. Thus, public displays of sympathy for the puppy betray the fascistic inclination of the masses.

Red Herring - not about why some animals shouldn't be harmed, but rather why it is justifiable to kill (or eat) certain species. Anyway, this is just a thought exercise. I know you aren't an animal lover too, and love to eat meat.

'those who hope to save themselves by opposing Marx’s real beard to Stalin’s false nose are wasting their time.' - Michel Foucault

Michel Foucualt: Manet and the Birth of the Viewer

A specific object linking Manet, Bataille and Foucault is none other than the mirror, ‘place without place’, which the latter situates, very significantly between utopia and hererotopia, and defines as a composite of both: ‘It is from the mirror that I find myself absent from the place where I am,’ he writes, ‘as long as I see myself there.’ Such is the discrete yet decisive role of painting in the theoretical work of Foucault: absolute hererotopia, a one-way mirror in which the mastery of man is effaced in his real life, it constitutes a sufficiently deep rupture in western discourse to have inflected the theoretical elaboration of Michel Foucault on space and time, serving as a grid for our modes of thinking and behaviour. This rupture produces a long silence; it is from this silence that the archaeologist is made.

– Nicolas Bourriaud in ‘Michel Foucualt: Manet and the Birth of the Viewer’, Manet and the Object of Painting, Tate: London, p. 19

Robert Desnos, “Description d’une révolte prochaine" (image by Georges Rochegrasse)

Having coming from the shadowy East, the men who had been civilized continued the same westward march as Attila, Tamburlaine and so many other famous men. Any man who can be described as “civilized” was once a barbarian. They were, in other words, the bastard sons of the adventurers of the night, or those the enemy (the Romans, the Greeks) had corrupted. Driven away from the shores of the Pacific and the slopes of the Himalayas, and unfaithful to their mission, they now found themselves facing those who drove them out in the not so distant times of invasions. Sons of Kalmouk, grandsons of the Huns, if you just stripped off the robes borrowed from a wardrobe in Athens or Thebes, the breastplates collected in Sparta and Rome, you would look as your fathers looked on their little horses. And you Normans who work the land, who fish for sardines and who drink cider, just get back on those flimsy boats that traced a long wake beyond the Arctic Circle before they reached those damp fields and these woods that teem with game. Mob, recognize your master! You thought you could flee it, flee that Orient that drove you away by vesting you with the right to destroy what you could not preserve, and now that you traveled around the world, you find it snapping at you heels again. I beg you, do not imitate a dog trying to catch its own tail: you will be running after the West forever. Stop. Say something to explain your mission to us, great oriental army, you who have now become The Westerners.

Robert Desnos, “Description d’une révolte prochaine,” La Révolution surréaliste, no.3. April 1925, p.25; reprinted in La Révolution surréaliste(1924-1929) (Paris, 1975 [facsimile edition])

Society Must Be Defended pp. 198-9 Michel Foucault

Language, Counter-Memory, Practice “Language to Infinity” – Michel Foucault, p.55

Perhaps there exists in speech an essential affinity between death, endless striving, and the self-representation of language. Perhaps the figure of a mirror to infinity erected against the black wall of death is fundamental for any language from the moment it determines to leave a trace of its passage. Not only since the invention of writing has language pretended to pursue itself to infinity; but neither is it because of its fear of death that is decided one day to assume a body in the form of visible and permanent signs. Rather, somewhat before the invention of writing, a change had occur to open the space in which writing could flow and establish itself, a change symbolized for us in its most original form by Homer, that forms one of the most decisive ontological events of language: mirrored reflection upon death and construction, from this reflection, of a virtual space where speech discovers the endless resourcefulness of its own image and where, it can represent itself as already existing behind itself, already active beyond itself, to infinity. The possibility of a work of language find its original fold in this duplication.

Language, Counter-Memory, Practice “Language to Infinity” – Michel Foucault, p.55

Language, Counter-Memory, Practice “Preface to Transgression” – Michel Foucault, pp. 44-

“When at the height of anguish, I gently solicit a strange absurdity, an eye opens at the summit, in the middle of my skull.” – Georges Bataille, Inner Experience

This is because the eye, a small white globe that encloses it darkness, traces a limiting circle that only sight can cross. And the darkness within, the somber core of the eye, pours out into the world like a fountain which sees, that is, which lights up the world; but the eye also gathers up all the light of the world in the iris, that small black spot, where it is transformed into the bright night of image. The eye is mirror and lamp: it discharges its light into the world around it, while in a movement that is not necessarily contradictory, it precipitates this same light into the transparency of its well. Its globe has the expansive quality of a marvelous seed – like an egg imploding towards the center of night and extreme light, which it is and which it has just creased to be. It is the figure of being in the act of transgressing its own limit.

The eye, in a philosophy of reflection, derives from its capacity to observe the power of becoming always more interior to itself. Lying behind each eye that sees, there exists a more tenuous one, an eye so discreet and yet so agile that that its all-powerful glance can be said to eat away at the flesh of the white globe; behind this particular eye, there exists another and, then, still others, each progressively more subtle until we arrive at an eye whose entire substance is nothing but the transparency of vision. This inner movement is finally resolved in a nonmaterial center where the intangible forms of truth are created and combined, in this heart of things which is the sovereign subject. Bataille reverses this entire direction: sight, crossing the globular limit of the eye, constitutes the eye in its instantaneous being; sight carries it away in this luminous stream (an outpouring fountain, streaming tears and, shortly blood), hurls the eye outside of itself, conducts it to the limit where it bursts out in the immediately extinguished flash of its being. Only a small white ball, veined with blood, is left behind, only exorbitated eye to which all sight is now denied.

Language, Counter-Memory, Practice “Preface to Transgression” – Michel Foucault, pp. 44-45