Animality, Metaethical Judgments and Predictive Justice by Ekin Erkan
LOCKDOWN THEORY #8
In a wading pool of philosophical mire and superimpositions - square cubes retrofitted upon cylindrical perforations - Anne-Françoise Schmid, “scientist amongst philosophers and philosopher amongst scientists,” rises from the morass, pronouncing that:
[t]he Earth is then silent, and is only perceived by the plants. La Mettrie could have taught us this in L’Homme-Plante. This silence is profound, more profound than the philosopher believes it to be, who thinks to have seamed [couturé] his system - for example, by his exclusion of women and animals. It is the silence which reaches him when, finally, he learns that there are other philosophies as lively as his and that he must postulate the de jure multiplicity of philosophies. Therefore, philosophy is silent: only isolated philosophies are talkative [bavardes]. ... We have the obligation of a silence, but a new silence, which does not result from the absence of noise.
Indeed, it is not a unified theory that Schmid seeks to impose but rather a political and poetic musing, one which recalls Katerina Kolozova’s comments in Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals (2019) concerning animality as a brute scaffold upon which Capital materiality creates “victims-in-person.” This reduction is the foundational gesture of Capital, diffuse and ripe for exacting surplus out of “pure value” - that is, life-preservation and vestiges of “reason” from divine violence: “[t]he Earth sees us, the animal sees us, the woman sees us. And the planet sees us, too. We believed we were the only ones to see.”
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