of her experience of hurt. Cavell is fully attuned to the fact that the wound Diamond speaks of is not the kind of hurt and misunderstanding that arises in the give and take of life, one that we could turn away from, given the right response. Is there a right response?
There is something in certain experiences Diamond feels that is recalcitrant to thought and she can convey such experiences only by means of examples.10 Stanley Cavell, in his response to Diamond, names this relation between the difficulty of reality and difficulty of philosophy as “inordinate knowledge.” It may be worthwhile to consider the examples Diamond gives and then the connections that Cavell makes between the experience of excess, feeling of suffocation, that this kind of knowledge entails that distinguishes it from knowledge that is pale or archived. If “the difficulty of reality” poses certain kinds of problems to philosophy, are these the same kinds of problems it raises for anthropology? Allow me to slow the pace of the thinking here, for the matters raised between Diamond and Cavell are delicate and how one might absorb the problematic in anthropology calls for caution.
Diamond places considerable weight in illustrating what she means by the difficulty of reality by forcefully evoking the cruelties entailed in how we humans treat animals, especially in the context of industrial production of animals as food. Yet she is not speaking as an animal rights advocate, but as one who is mortally wounded, haunted, or maddened by the knowledge of what we do to animals. Diamond takes the example of Mrs. Costello, the protagonist of a novel by J.M. Coetzee, who presented parts of this novel as part of his Tanner lectures on ethics. Mrs. Costello is an elderly woman novelist, a woman “haunted by the horror of what we do to animals.” The occasion where the rawness of her nerves is shown is the occasion of a distinguished lecture she has been invited to give in the university where her son teaches. The story unfolds as an unseemly confrontation between the speaker and her audience, especially by the comparison she makes between what we do to animals with the horrors of the Nazi camps. For Diamond, the way to read Coetzee’s story is to see it as outside the frame of arguments and counterarguments. Instead, she invites us to think of how Coetzee presents a woman whose every word, she claims, is a wound for there is no region of language left untouched by this experience. For many others, Diamond notes, Coetzee is making an argument through a fictional device on how we should treat animals. What is the difficulty of reality here?
Our treatment of animals, however, is not the only example Diamond takes. A second example comes from a searing poem by Ted Hughes called “Six Young Men” in which the speaker of the poem is looking at a faded photo from 1914 of these six young men, profoundly and fully alive when the photo was taken, and yet within six months all six were dead in the war. Here is Ted Hughes, saying, “To regard this photograph might well dement.” But still, as Diamond says, “It is possible to describe the photo so it does not seem boggling at all” (2008: 44).
So, what is mind boggling in the two examples? At one place in the story of Mrs. Costello, she seems to be deliberately causing offense by making a comparison between the treatment of animals in food factories and the treatment of Jews in Nazi camps. And although the comparison seems obnoxious at first hurried reading, it becomes apparent that she is comparing the claims of ignorance through which many Germans tried to exonerate themselves; and the kinds of justifications many people give of being unaware of the cruel practices carried out in animal farms and their indifference to other humans who are appalled, or wounded by this indifference to them.
Mrs. Costello’s lecture (in the novel) includes her statements on this comparison – one of these statements reads: “The crime of the Third Reich, says the voice of accusation, was to treat people like animals … by treating fellow human beings, created on the image of God, like beasts, they had themselves become beasts.” Here lies an important clue for Cavell’s statement that how we treat animals is an allegory for how we treat humans. I want to add here, though, that Coetzee is explicit that Mrs. Costello is seeing her fellow human beings as having become beastly. In taking offense at her argument, her audience completely misses the point that the slaughterhouse of the animals is seen by her as preparation for human brutality that turns from animals to other humans.
For Diamond then, the joining of the difficulty of reality to the difficulty of philosophy is that philosophy has no means of addressing the wounded speaking animal, except through arguments about rights and personhood, and the most humane ways of killing animals. This is a kind of “as if” engagement: Diamond, using an expression of Cavell’s, calls this mode of argumentation a deflection. In Coetzee’s novel, Mrs. Costello experiences this terrible rawness of nerves in the kind of questions the audience puts to her; ironically Diamond finds this deflection mirrored in the commentaries on Coetzee’s Tanner Lectures, and if one may add in many commentaries on Diamond’s essay. (If more facts were known, more humane ways of killing would surely evolve [Hacking 2008]; surely the imagination that some can experience animals to be their companions is just part of a putative reality [McDowell 2008].) Against these kinds of arguments, the question for Diamond is: how can we remain indifferent to the fact that some among us experience some animals as their companions, while others can kill and eat them without blinking an eye? This is a question of being unable to imagine an embodied sense of the extinction of another. Our knowledge of our vulnerability to death is wounding in the light of what we do to animals both in reality and as an allegory of what we do to each other, as humans.
We might want to be reminded at this point of Diamond’s observation that from some perspectives, the examples she offers would not cause any disquiet. But she feels that the entire response to her woundedness offered as erudite arguments is to deflect the issues and inflict hurt of a different order. As an example, I remember discussing with a colleague how I felt unhinged reading some articles in defense of torture after I had heard an almost primitive cry wrenched out from the mother of a torture survivor, and this colleague responding with “different people are entitled to have different views” said sympathetically, yet not connecting to my sense of what was at stake at all. But the difficulty this raises for philosophy, which is that of the impossibility of thinking itself, is of one order – I want to say that the difficulty of what this means to go on within a community, with kin and with neighbors, who have or are suspected to have engaged in killings and rape might be of a different order. I am aware of all the work on forgiveness and reconciliation but with few exceptions most scholars take this work to be that of the individual subject and not of the way the social is brought to bear on these issues or the work of time (see the remarkable work of Osanloo 2020 in this context, though; see also Das 2021).
Most people in the urban slums I work with are not likely to find themselves in lecture halls but they do express themselves publicly. I have written in an earlier book (Das 2007) about the massive violence against members of the Sikh community in Delhi after the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. I worked with the survivors then for more than a year and faced the complete denial on the part of government officials that deaths of Sikh men had taken place at such massive scale in Delhi and elsewhere. I would like to loop back to a description of one of the streets in which killings had happened and the way women sat in silence in these streets as a gesture through which lamenting and cursing were expressed in the excess of the body.
More powerful than even the words, though, was the way that the women sat in silence outside their houses refusing to bring mourning to an end … the women were often scared to speak out, but their gestures of mourning that went on and on and on showed the deeply altered meaning of death … the women defiantly hung on to their filth and their pollution. They would not go into the houses, they would not light the cooking hearths, they would not change their clothes … the small heaps of ashes (remains of the fires on which bodies were burnt), the abandoned houses, the blood splattered walls created a funeral landscape, the sight of the women with their unwashed bodies and unbraided hair was a potent sign that mourning and protest were part of the same event. (Das 2007: 195)
These were responses carved out of ritual and mythology and embodied the notion of curses on the perpetrators, but also on a world that had allowed such grievous violence to happen. The whole of language was an accusation. I do not know if this kind of difficulty
