The Only Labourer Left: Resituating the Nonhuman Animal in the Language of Labour and the History of Philosophy
Abstract
This dissertation is an investigation of the ontological position of the nonhuman animal within the Marxist tradition and as it concerns both the language of value production and the slaughterhouse. The premise of my study is an engagement with Marx’s oeuvre and influences, as well those who respond to his work. Within this context, I propose that the nonhuman animal’s ontological position—as it concerns labour, language, and intellect—is subject to a gesture of erasure which marks their being as performing the action of interest in the absence of the possibility to claim either determination, or fluency of capability. This paradoxical presence shores up theoretical characterizations of the nonhuman animal as a creature who labours, but is not a labourer, who speaks but lacks language, and who thinks but has no thought. My first chapter investigates the way Marx—uninterested in the animal—allows such creatures to creep into his work, mostly through references to ecology. Responding to contemporary discourse within Marxist animal studies, I argue that the animal remains a problem in Marx—something which complicates the boundary of the definition of value production. As such, I offer a novel analysis of the nonhuman animal’s labour in the slaughterhouse. I then turn to Aristotle as the source from whom Marx derives the definition of value. Unlike Marx, Aristotle, I argue, situates the nonhuman animal in a position of relevant context. As such, I reread concepts of perception, imagination, and judgement for the improbability of Man as a contained subject from whom the nonhuman animal is made a degraded Other. Finally, I relate my investigation to Fredric Jameson’s Political Unconscious. How can a text that is devoted to uncovering the essential framework of class analysis and labour exclude the nonhuman animal? To answer this, I turn to the tradition in which Jameson writes, and apply the master-bondsman dialectic to the slaughterhouse. This analysis leads me to my conclusion wherein I affirm that the force of the slaughterhouse and animal industry sets up a world in which there is only one labourer left: the nonhuman animal.