142 chApter four
the sympathetic imagination defies this mastery by extending itself to that
which thought cannot foreclose. (Think again of Animal’s wonder at the
“empty space” that was nothing and everything all at once.) Despite the
inevitable failure of her appeal, Costello insists that everyone—most ur-
gently perhaps academics by virtue of being custodians of knowledge—
must move beyond empirical knowledge into a form of thinking that im-
plicates feeling. Picking up on this failure of imagination (of feeling and
sympathy) within the academy and far beyond, Sam Durrant (2006) argues
that The Lives of Animals is a text that continuously rehearses the failure
of the sympathetic imagination in order to make way for a more effective
relation toward the Other. For Durrant, this failure is “a precondition for
a new kind of ethical and literary relation, a relation grounded in the ac-
knowledgment of one’s ignorance of the other, on the recognition of the
other’s fundamental alterity” (120).
Humanimal Metaphorics
There is arguably no more contentious moment in The Lives of Animals
than Coetzee’s turn toward the Holocaust, where the future humanimalities
as a politics of dispossession comes into view. If ignorance of the Other is
indeed always necessary, and as Durrant argues perhaps even productively
so, Costello attempts to move her interlocutors toward a practice of respon-
sible ignorance. Such a practice stands in contrast to the ignorance enacted
during the Holocaust, during which people living near the camps ignored
the practices of extermination that were so clearly signaled around them.
This ignorance, Costello declares, situates those citizens imbued with full
humanity as complicit with Holocaust executioners. Like the executioners,
she provocatively claims, they refused to imagine themselves in the place
of those being tortured and killed. In this way, the Holocaust represents a
collective failure of the sympathetic imagination (Coetzee 1999, 34). This is
the juncture at which Costello links the politics of Holocaust complicity to
Western culture at large, which overwhelmingly ignores the mass torture
and slaughter of factory- farmed animals. In each case, the failure to imag-
ine oneself in the (horrific) position of the Other is a collective failure. She
reminds her audience that “sympathy has everything to do with the subject
and little to do with the object” (34– 3 5). This call to imagine oneself in the
place of the Other might seem to risk the same collapse of difference in the