"Rachel Getting Married" plus Agamben beef

I just watched the movie "Rachel Getting Married." As far as a value-review, I will say it is worth watching. It is a kind of discontents of civilization problem: how drug addiction can spread hurt throughout a family almost without end. This is not the kind of problem we find among nonhuman animal, so it is particularly humane/humanistic to contemplate this kind of pain. It makes you a better Dasein.

There is a momentary shot during the reception of a large grill covered in meat. This kind of shocked me for two reasons: 1) the film's excellence had led me to ally myself with it with minimal irony or reservation 2) the wedding seems to be heavily Buddhist influenced, and nontraditional at the least, so I expected something other than the sacrificial lamb on the bbq. (I can only assume it is organic or grain fed or something).

Put together, there is a real question for veg/animal studies: the historicizing of vegetarianism/veganism as a political practice. The "civilization and its discontents" arc argues that this is the kind of problem specific to a certain level of complexity in society and its moral sensibility. What is a problem for us (killing and eating animals) would not even make sense in times not so long passed--or in social conditions extant but not so pleasant to think on. There is a pull for sumptuary politics to dehistoricize itself in response to this criticism and say that eating animals is never ok out of fear that Pollan and Polyface Farms will get the upper hand. (I think it is not difficult to say that 'ethical meat' belongs to the same social world in which vegetarianism is logically the best ethical choice, and by this avoid 'life boat' hypotheticals which interject an unrelated social world).

So here is my beef with Agamben, or really with those people who have hastily seized on his corpus to make over extensive arguments (Agamben is not pro-animal in any transparent sense). If we are going to extend biopolitics and the differentiation between zoe and bios from the Greeks to the present, how do we account for the painfully historical phenomenon of ethical or political vegetarianism/veganism? What many people overlook, in my eyes, is a disjunction between is and would: just because Aristotle, or Justinian law, or Hobbes says something is so doesn't mean it is. In fact, if it is a metaphysical or legal claim it is almost certainly a projection of how things should be thought rather than how they are typically thought. The experience of the majority of persons under those social conditions was probably quite distant from the conditions under which sumptuary politics can be thought coherently; only when law is already accomplished, rather than an historical destiny/task (to use Agamben's terms) can sumptuary politics emerge. When humans live in a world where the material force of law is less than its written scope, humans are closer to animals than to the juridical authorities taken by historians as Chroniclers. The distinction between bios and zoe was then, as it is now, a heuristic for the philosophical classes who are almost by definition removed from physical labor and contact with animals.

That is: removed from the class of animals where carnivorism might make sense for humans qua their animality.

This is in no way an apology for blue collar workers, or workers of any stripe, rolling out the hot dog and hamburger parade (this is the 4th of July). I am saying that if we can imagine a condition in which humans are on par with real animals, then we can imagine, as a subset of that, a social condition in which eating meat makes sense. The condition of humans among the rest of the animals is the starting point from which a non-negative ethos toward animals must emerge. Reconciling this with sumptuary politics is not impossible but it does require a proper understanding of historical method.