Beyond speech, beyond species: the human/nonhuman binary and an ethics of sublimity

The harsh realities of ecological catastrophe and biodiversity loss are currently forcing us to reappraise our ambiguous relationship with the nonhuman world. Ideologies of human exceptionalism abound not only in our everyday lives, but also in some antihumanist attempts to bridge nature and culture, and surely, along with a faceless neoliberalism's commodification of nature, have a hand in this deteriorating state of affairs. The denial or disavowal of nonhuman subjectivities is pathological and overdetermined, serving more than the self-preservation of industries or economies that profit from animal bodies, and it is such defense mechanisms that this thesis seeks to understand. I see individual psychic processes of abjecting nature or animality mirrored at the level of culture, territorializing 'the human' as both individual body and category. The work of Darwin, Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida, Caillois, and Merleau-Ponty have destabilized the notion of the autonomous rational entity of 'the human' above and against the entity of 'the animal,' but one figure who was intensely critical of nature/culture binarity has been hugely overlooked in the antihumanist literature: The Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu.