Unthinking Mastery

140 chApter four

act of listening as absolutely central to understanding. Recall that Costello

urges her audience members to “listen to their hearts” rather than to be

governed by the didactic structure of the lecture form. Listening—even

when we struggle profoundly to hear—is therefore absolutely fundamental

to a becoming with the Other. As Doniger suggests, these other languages

are forms of communication that must be not only heard but also inter-

preted. “This is the language we must learn to read,” she insists. Like the

human languages I discussed in chapter 2, animal languages will likewise

continue to defy our will toward mastery over them. Yet since the act of

reading (most broadly defined) is in all cases an imaginative and interpre-

tive one, it is also therefore an act through which we might radically recon-

ceive our responsibilities toward and as others. The voices of “barbarians,”

natives, and slaves were, after all, once similarly voices not worthy of being

heard by the colonial ear. Both Costello and Doniger imply that by listening

to those voices that have been forced to submit, voices that are so “foreign”

that they have remained unheard, a radical reconceptualization of subjec-

tivity itself can emerge. While this reconceptualization of vulnerable listen-

ing informs relations among humans, both Costello and Doniger insist that

it necessitates a wholly new sense of being with/as animals.

Future Humanimalities
Rather than to articulate the animal as a figure for the oppression of more
worthy human subjects, as anticolonial discourse has been wont to do,^6
Costello’s commitment to sympathetic imaginings and practices of cul-
tivated listening enables her to posit the animal as subject and her own
subject- position as animal. In doing so, she urges us toward what I call the
future humanimalities. Once we begin to take seriously the animality of
the human, we must rethink the reach and methods—as well as the sub-
jects and objects—of the humanities. Traditional humanities have taken
for granted the human as an empirical object of study (as I discussed in
different contexts in chapters 2 and 3) and have understood their impor-
tance as a pedagogical act of humanizing certain (human) subjects. Once
we deconstruct the presupposed differences between humans and animals,
the disciplinary division erected on that distinction will begin to crumble.
To cultivate the future humanimalities, we might first ask how our already
existing skills as scholars can move us beyond the masterful human en-