Alice A. Kuzniar's Melancholia's Dog: Reflections on Our Animal Kinship is a book about dogs and people. Dogs eclipse all other species when it comes to reading the body language of people and Kuzniar inquires into 'how the literary and visual arts explore shifting, unsure divisions and alliances between man and beast and how they do so based on the uniqueness of each animal life’.

After setting out the context in an introduction, Kuzniar presents four chapters: "Muteness," "Shame," "Intimacy," and "Mourning." Her basic idea is that these are dimensions of our interactions with canids (mostly domestic ones), the outcomes of which are melancholy for us, and perhaps for the dogs.

Because they are "beings that lack the word," in Derrida's phrase, we feel isolated from them and filled with sadness. We fall back on our projection and our anthropomorphism (some of us more than others), but ultimately we don't know what they are feeling. Kuzniar believes this must sadden us, whether because of their deficiencies or our own.

Animals may lack the word but they are not silent. Dylan Trigg says that the animal’s body is full of pathos and expression, its eyes and ears caught up in the texture of the world, yet its voice is mute. There is a silence that takes place with the animal, but a silence through which communication is dependent. He adds:

Heidegger will speak of this silence in terms of poverty, an inability to see the world as world. A line is drawn in Heidegger’s analysis, a refusal to meet the animal face-to-face. For him, the silence of animal is an opportunity for Dasein to define its ontology, a model that is created from the inverse ontology of the animal. The animal’s silence is worldless, a life with no no existence, a pure facticity.

Comments

Posted by: Les | November 25, 2010 6:35 AM