Can The Human Speak?

Abstract

How does one give voice to the unspeakable, inhuman violence that shapes the present, and what remains of humanity in its wake? Adriana Cavarero offers an answer that roots human speech in embodied vulnerability, in contrast to philosophical emphases on disembodied rationality. In the face of what she calls horrorism, which puts humans in proximity to animality, she calls for resuscitating vocality, and therefore humanity, from loss. This article reads Kafka’s short story “A Report to an Academy” – which structurally resembles a slave narrative and concerns a kidnapped ape who learns to speak – to extend Cavarero’s emphasis on vulnerability while challenging her humanism. In Kafka, modern horror’s locus is not animality but the abstract human, and it projects the unstable distinction between voice and noise onto blackened humans and nonhuman animals.

Keywords:

• vulnerability
• horror
• Adriana Cavarero
• Franz Kafka
• anti-blackness
• animality
• speech
• voice

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I would like to thank Will Kymlicka, Sue Donaldson, and Tim Huzar for their close readings and comments on the manuscript, and Jane Bennett for her comments on an earlier version of the Kafka sections. Mark Thompson guided and helped inspire my initial reading of Kafka. Thanks also to Ali Aslam, Megan Gallagher, Matthew Mautarelli, and Paulo Ravecca, in addition to participants in colloquiums from the CUNY Graduate Center and Queen’s University’s APPLE Center, for their comments and encouragement during various presentations of this material.

2 See Part I of Joanna Bourke’s What It Means to Be Human for more on the historical connection between speech and the meaning of humanity.

3 Thanks to Tim Huzar for helping me see this point.

4 Even further, Cavarero’s account could contribute to ongoing scholarly debates about animals and other nonhumans. The contrast between singularity and individuality or personhood could intervene on debates about the utility of the latter for animals (see, e.g., Deckha); and her account of speech has clear implications for the question of whether animals speak, which this article pursues (see also Meijer).

5 In Surging Democracy, which is Cavarero’s most recent monograph and was translated into English in the final stages of the present article, she seems to come closer to reconsidering the import of nonhuman voices. Discussing the work of Elias Canetti, who she approvingly cites as someone attentive to the “voice of plurality,” she notes Canetti’s attention to a “polyphony” focused on but which extends beyond the human voice to include “animal cries and noises of every sort” (Cavarero, Surging Democracy 75–76).

6 Indeed, there is a conversation to be had between my arguments here and the work of Sylvia Wynter, who, like Cavarero, emphasizes narration and seeks to displace abstract conceptualizations of humanity (which she calls Man) in favor of a more open, encompassing humanism, but who pays more attention to enslavement than Cavarero does.

7 Another classic example is John Locke’s discussion of parrots in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book III, Chapter I.

8 This reading draws from Derrida’s reading of Rousseau’s essay in Of Grammatology. Additionally, see Neumark (“Introduction”; Voicetracks) for illuminating developments of the implications of voice’s ambiguity for nonhumans.

9 I see this as the fundamental question that Saidiya Hartman asks in “Venus in Two Acts,” in the context of enslaved women whose only trace in the archive is the violence visited upon them. Hartman, like Cavarero, seeks to tell their stories but I find her to be more ambivalent about the possibility of doing so non-violently, and she also does not wrap this desire in a broader ontology of the human.

10 On the relationship between singularity and naming in the context of captivity, see Söderbäck.

11 Thanks to Tristan Klingelhöfer for alerting me to the discrepancy from the German and helping develop its implications.

12 On the creative potentials of the abyss and opacity, see Jacob Kripp’s reading of Glissant and Arendt. Kripp’s reading works well as the other, creative side of my account, which has mostly focused on the violence of horror.