this world? At what points does their action impact on my life, and vice versa? What are our points of friction, our possible alliances and the rules of cohabitation to be invented in order to live in harmony?’
‘A possible detour to get us back home’
I have just referred, as does Morizot, to the worm composter and its worms as a site for social exchange. A site that also requires a detailed knowledge of habits, attention, alliances and compromises. This example is important because it tells us that becoming a ‘tracker’, ‘becoming a diplomat’ with animals, actually involves a transformation in ways of thinking, of reading signs and of attuning (recognizing and creating harmony between) habits and intentions. Tracking may involve travelling great distances or through forests, but it doesn’t always require it.
After all, as Morizot says, tracking is above all ‘an art of finding our way back home’. Or rather, he implies, it is an art of finding ourselves at home: but this ‘at home’ is not the same as before, just as the ‘self’ which finally finds itself at home has itself become different.
Tracking means learning to rediscover a habitable and more hospitable world where feeling ‘at home’ no longer makes us stingy and jealous little proprietors (the ‘masters and possessors of nature’, as seemed so obvious to Descartes), but cohabitants marvelling at the quality of life in the presence of other beings.
Tracking means enriching our habits. It is a form of becoming, of self-metamorphosis: ‘activating in oneself the powers of a different body’, as the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro writes. It means finding in ourselves the crow’s leaping curiosity, the worm’s way of being alive – perhaps even, like the worm, feeling ourselves breathing through our skins – the bear’s desiring patience, or the panther’s replete patience, or the very different patience of the wolf parents of a turbulent pup. It means gaining access, as Morizot says, ‘to the prompts specific to another body’.
But ‘all this,’ he adds, ‘is very difficult to formulate, we have to circle round it.’
In the wonderful book in which he recounts his long friendship with a bitch called Mélodie, the Japanese writer Akira Mizubayashi discusses the difficulties that his adopted language imposes on his way of describing the relationship between him and his animal companion. He writes:
The French language, which I have embraced and made my own over a long apprenticeship, stems from the age of Descartes. It carries with it, in one sense, the trace of this fundamental break that means it becomes possible to classify non-human living beings as machines to be exploited. It is sad to note that the language of the time since Descartes somewhat obscures my sight when I contemplate the animal world, so abundant, so generous, so benevolent, described by Montaigne.6
We inherit, then, a language which in certain respects accentuates the tendency to de-animate the world around us – as evidenced by the simple fact (to take just one example as highlighted by Bruno Latour) that we only have at our disposal the grammatical categories of passivity and activity.
To narrate the activity of tracking, as Morizot does, to narrate the effects of this ‘finding our way back home’, involved learning to get rid of certain words, playing tricks with syntax so as to account for presences or, more precisely, effects of presence, so as to evoke affects that flood through the body (joy, desire, surprise, uncertainty, patience, fear sometimes), to use the writing of the investigation in order to touch on what goes beyond this writing, as Morizot himself was touched while writing. He had to twist the language of philosophy, to defamiliarize himself from it, to poetically force the grammar, sometimes forge terms or divert their meaning (what he has elsewhere called a semantic wilding),7 because none of the terms we have inherited could express the event of the encounter or the grace of awaiting it. To create, in other words, a poetics of inhabiting, an experimental poetics, out in the open air, with plural bodies.
Beyond all that this book teaches us about what animals can do, as well as the humans who go out to encounter them, beyond the concrete and highly innovative political proposals for another way of inhabiting the earth with others, Morizot invites us to explore not only the close confines of our world, but the very limits of our language. To express the event of life.
Where are you going tomorrow? Actually, from the very first words, you will already be on your way.
Vinciane Despret
Notes
1 1. Jean-Christophe Bailly, Le Parti pris des animaux (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2013).
2 2. The idea of thinking about the relationships with living things in an inchoate sense is formulated by Baptiste Morizot in an interview with Pierre Charbonnier and Bruno Latour: ‘Redécouvrir la terre’, Tracés. Revue de sciences sociales [online], 33, 2017, posted on 19 September 2017, accessed 14 December 2017. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/traces/7071; DOI: 10.4000/traces.7071.
3 3. A very good example of this intimacy without proximity can be found in Jacob Metcalf’s article on human–grizzly encounters: ‘Intimacy without Proximity: Encountering Grizzlies as a Companion Species,’ Environmental Philosophy, vol. 5, no. 2, autumn 2008.
4 4. See Morizot, ‘Redécouvrir la terre’.
5 5. My own work is to some extent a response, at once speculative and pragmatic, to the richly suggestive remarks made in Bruno Latour, Où atterrir? Comment s’orienter en politique (Paris: La Découverte, ‘Cahiers Libres’, 2017).
6 6. Akira Mizubayashi, Mélodie, chronique d’une passion (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Folio’, 2013).
7 7. Baptiste Morizot, Les Diplomates. Cohabiter avec les loups sur une autre carte du vivant (Marseille: Wildproject, 2016), p. 149.
Preamble Enforesting oneself
‘Where are we going tomorrow?’
‘Into nature.’1
Among our group of friends, for a long time the answer was obvious, with no risks and no problems, unquestioned. And then the anthropologist Philippe Descola came along with his book Beyond Nature and Culture,2 and taught us that the idea of nature was a strange belief of Westerners, a fetish of the very same civilization which has a problematic, conflictual and destructive relation with the living world they call ‘nature’.
So we could no longer say to each other, when organizing our outings: ‘Tomorrow, we’re going into nature.’ We were speechless, mute, unable to formulate the simplest things. The banal problem of formulating ‘where are we going tomorrow?’ with other people has become a philosophical stutter: What formula can we use to express another way of going outside? How can we name where we are going, on the days when we head off with friends, family, or alone, ‘into nature’?
The word ‘nature’ is not innocent: it is the marker of a civilization devoted to exploiting territories on a massive scale as if they were just inert matter, and to sanctifying small spaces dedicated to recreation, sporting activities or spiritual replenishment – all more impoverished attitudes towards the living world than one would have liked. Naturalism, in Descola’s view, is our conception of the world: a Western cosmology which postulates that there are on the one side human beings living in a closed society, facing an objective nature made up of matter on the other side, a mere passive backdrop for human activities. This cosmology takes it for granted that nature
