Negarse a hablar: La ética del silencio animal y el sacrificio en Coetzee y Derrida

Sundhya Walther; Hajime Espinosa

Authors

Sundhya Walther Universidad de Toronto
Hajime Espinosa

Keywords:

Coetzee, Derrida, animals, sacrifice, silence, ethics

Abstract

J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello interprets animal silence as a form of resistance to human exploitation. This essay interrogates Elizabeth Costello's interpretation of animal silence by exploring the role of such silence in the construction of the human subject via its constitutive finitude. I consider three textual speaker/protagonists—Elizabeth Costello in The Lives of Animals, Derrida in The Animal that Therefore I Am, and David Lurie in Disgrace—who are interested, and even invested, in the relationship between the particular resistant potential of animal silence and their own mortality as autobiographically-speaking human beings. I argue that the intersection between nonhuman silence and human mortality should be understood through the concept of sacrifice, which, as my reading of Derrida demonstrates, destabilizes any interpretation of animal silence as autonomously resistant. Through this relationship between silence and sacrifice, I seek to resituate the ethics of Disgrace, and especially to decentre the speaking voice of David Lurie as the ethical heart of the narrative, presenting a significant revision to previous readings of the novel. While much critical attention has proposed that the seeming expansion of Lurie's sympathetic imagination in his interactions with dogs signals his development as an ethical being, my argument locates the ethic of the novel not in the speaking voice of David Lurie, but rather in the many significant silences, both human and animal, contained within the text.

Author Biography

Hajime Espinosa

Egresada del Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica (CCC) y de la Escuela de la Sociedad General de Escritores de México (SOGEM). Cursó estudios de Biología y Divulgación de las Ciencias, en la UNAM.

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