Seung-Hoon Jeung, 'A Global Cinematic Zone of Animal and Technology' in Animals (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd, 2016) pp. 99-100
Showing posts with label Seung-Hoon Jeung. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Seung-Hoon Jeung. Show all posts
12 Mar 2020
Becoming-animal exercises the ethical art of embracing the animal as gifted
In short, becoming-animal exercises the ethical art of embracing the animal as gifted. Through its indifferent hospitality man does not so much become an animal as disintegrate into the visual grounding of all actual beings.
An exceptional state where there is no host/guest power structure
What renders 'ecological hospitality' impossible is not the human host's abandonment of his ownership and control […] but primarily the animal guest's complete indifference to the host. […]
No animal, indeed, has the concept of and respect for the hospitable human's property and protection. What underlies this animality is antiphusis, as aforementioned, with nature as dark, violent, rotten, hostile, which appears negative in the anthropocentric frame, but which fundamentally implies neutrality for the human. […]
In other words, pure hospitality that is always impossible when offered by the human to the animal might be possible when we rethink it the other way around. […]
Genuine hospitality is, then, that which can be only recognized, retroactively, by the visitor and not the inviter, in an exceptional state where there is actually no host/guest power structure. Derrida also suggests a 'hospitality of visitation rather than invitation', adding that the visit might actually be very dangerous, but 'a hospitality without risk, a hospitality backed by certain assurances, a hospitality protected by an immune system against the wholly other' could not be true hospitality. This true hospitality is again almost impossible to realize, whereas its significance may lie in that it serves as the conceptual idea of actual tolerance, if not perfect, still needed in reality […]. Yet we can go further than this conceptual justification of pure hospitality or gift on the human's side if we posit the visitor not as the host but as the guest of animal hospitality in a zone of indeterminacy between subject and object. Visitation would thus be viewed as an ethical adventure of abandoning one's subjectivity as a host, becoming a volunteer homo sacer who can be killed without being sacrificed in anti-nature, and finding oneself to be in an unprepared and unexpected hospitality without any symmetrical exchange or companionship with the other. Does this not suggest an ethics that is not responsible for the other as a vulnerable sufferer but responsive to the other as a pure gift? A truly ethical act might be to accept the other's being in itself as a gift to me in the realization that it is I who is vulnerable and thus virtually accepted by the very other, gifted its unintended hospitality.
No animal, indeed, has the concept of and respect for the hospitable human's property and protection. What underlies this animality is antiphusis, as aforementioned, with nature as dark, violent, rotten, hostile, which appears negative in the anthropocentric frame, but which fundamentally implies neutrality for the human. […]
In other words, pure hospitality that is always impossible when offered by the human to the animal might be possible when we rethink it the other way around. […]
Genuine hospitality is, then, that which can be only recognized, retroactively, by the visitor and not the inviter, in an exceptional state where there is actually no host/guest power structure. Derrida also suggests a 'hospitality of visitation rather than invitation', adding that the visit might actually be very dangerous, but 'a hospitality without risk, a hospitality backed by certain assurances, a hospitality protected by an immune system against the wholly other' could not be true hospitality. This true hospitality is again almost impossible to realize, whereas its significance may lie in that it serves as the conceptual idea of actual tolerance, if not perfect, still needed in reality […]. Yet we can go further than this conceptual justification of pure hospitality or gift on the human's side if we posit the visitor not as the host but as the guest of animal hospitality in a zone of indeterminacy between subject and object. Visitation would thus be viewed as an ethical adventure of abandoning one's subjectivity as a host, becoming a volunteer homo sacer who can be killed without being sacrificed in anti-nature, and finding oneself to be in an unprepared and unexpected hospitality without any symmetrical exchange or companionship with the other. Does this not suggest an ethics that is not responsible for the other as a vulnerable sufferer but responsive to the other as a pure gift? A truly ethical act might be to accept the other's being in itself as a gift to me in the realization that it is I who is vulnerable and thus virtually accepted by the very other, gifted its unintended hospitality.
Seung-Hoon Jeung, 'A Global Cinematic Zone of Animal and Technology' in Animals (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd, 2016) pp. 97-98
To explore a larger bio-polis
Ontological others of the human call for our attention in this regard, urging us to explore a larger bio-polis emerging between, and encompassing both, the human world that becomes ever more globally homogenized and its radically external-immanent environment, natural or technological. The question of how to face this environment requires complexly ethical rather than simply political attitudes, since biopolitics concerns not a new public sphere so much as the condition of any such polis.
Seung-Hoon Jeung, 'A Global Cinematic Zone of Animal and Technology' in Animals (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd, 2016) p. 96
Nature did not pre-exist culture in that its idea was not born until culture named and incorporated it
Nature did not pre-exist culture in that its idea was not born until culture named and incorporated it into the conceptual frame of what humans believe as reality. Only within this frame does nature appear to be the opposite of our lifeworld, while the frame itself remains cultural.
Seung-Hoon Jeung, 'A Global Cinematic Zone of Animal and Technology' in Animals (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd, 2016) p. 94
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