humAnImAl dIspossessIons 139Does she want to convert her audience to vegetarianism? Does she want
more humane treatment for animals, or to stop testing on them? To this
request for clarification, Costello replies: “I was hoping not to have to enun-
ciate principles.... If principles are what you want to take away from this
talk, I would have to respond, open your heart and listen to what your
heart says” (Coetzee 1999, 37). Costello’s response is wholly inadequate to
the context and no doubt strikes her audience as an evasion and a sign that
she lacks a strong thesis. Indeed, it does both of these things, but it also
does more. Implicit in her response is an assertion that the act of listening
(to which I will return in the coda to this book) has greater ethical poten-
tial than speaking. Declarative speech is tied to the proscriptive, to the
realm of law, which like reason is tautological and justifies its own ends. It
is through a practice of vulnerable listening that Costello imagines we might
hear something not merely spoken but felt. Recall here the discussion in the
previous chapter of Singh’s howl, which he cannot finally utter. Or Cassie’s
howl—one that I could hear but stubbornly could not read during the sud-
den onset of her blindness. What is at stake for Costello is not a reasonable
claim about animals but a practice of learning to encounter animals vulner-
ably, including the wounded animal that she is. That we all are.
In her response to Coetzee’s text, religious historian Wendy Doniger
(1999) challenges Costello’s position on animal silence by suggesting that
far from confronting us with silence, the animal repeatedly speaks a lan-
guage we simply refuse to hear. It is through this language—through the
voice that is not heard precisely because another voice disables or refuses
its recognition—that we can critically consider the productive potential
of silent engagement. In Jean- Luc Nancy’s formulation of the philosopher,
he tells us that the philosopher is one who “cannot listen,” who “neutral-
izes listening within himself, so he can philosophize” (2007, 1). To exceed
philosophy, then, we must press on listening to those voices that appear
voiceless in order to produce new forms of engaged entanglement with
and beyond ourselves. The potential of vulnerable listening resides in an
exchange between (animal) “silence” and (human) listening, an exchange
that exceeds the didactic clamor of disciplinarity by crossing the borders
of reason. To Doniger’s mind, the question is not whether the animal has
language but about the human refusal to hear its “silences.”
Doniger extends Costello’s formulation of animal language to include
not only voice but also gesture, gaze, and so on. Like Costello, she posits the