By PAULO FERNANDES SILVEIRA*
An education for otherness also involves the relationship we establish with animals, with their vulnerabilities, their afflictions, their affections.
“There is talk of the definitive organization of an Animal Protection Society. I have an Egyptian respect for animals. I think they have a soul, even if rudimentary, and that they feel consciously revolt against human injustice.”
(José do Patrocínio, 1905, notes for his last article).
As a lay reader of the subject, I have always been struck by the number of Jewish philosophers, novelists and poets who, after the Holocaust, investigated themes related to animals. This same impression was expressed by the Jewish philosopher Jacques Derrida (2006) in the book: The animal that I soon am. Some of these authors directly suffered the effects of Jewish barbarity and genocide.
In the early 2000s, the American historian Charles Patterson (2009) published a book that became a reference on this subject: Eternal Treblinka: our treatment of animals and the Holocaust.
The title of this book evokes a passage from the short story “The Letter Writer”, by the Jewish novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer (1984), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978.
The story centers on the character of Herman Gombiner, a vegetarian editor and translator who lost his family to the Nazis. Gombiner lives alone in a small apartment in upstate New York. Every night, he leaves a piece of bread, a slice of cheese, and a saucer of water for Huldah, a rat who lives with him in his studio apartment.
The name that Gombiner gave the rat refers to a biblical character known for her wisdom. When she fell ill, Gombiner stopped feeding Huldah. Thinking that the rat had died of hunger, he wrote a eulogy in her honor:
“What do all these scholars, all these philosophers, all these world leaders know about someone like you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst offender of all species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created simply to provide him with food and fur, to be tormented and exterminated. In their eyes, all people are Nazis; animals live in an eternal Treblinka” (SINGER, 1984, p. 271; SINGER, 2004, p. 323).
By comparing the genocide of the Jews to the slaughter of animals, Patterson's book was the subject of numerous criticisms. This debate intensified in 2003, when the non-governmental organization PeTA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) promoted the photo campaign: “The Holocaust on your plate” (KLEIN, 2011). One of the panels reproduced the phrase: “To animals, all people are Nazis”. In the same image, prisoners from Auschwitz appeared next to caged chickens.
A part of the Jewish community was offended and outraged by this comparison. Taking a different position, Derrida argues that animal genocides exist, since there are a large number of species on the verge of extinction because of man. In these terms, the philosopher states: “the figure of genocide should neither be abused nor disposed of too quickly” (DERRIDA, 2006, p. 46).
In one of the chapters of his book, Patterson (2009) outlines a broad historical panorama of violence justified by the animalization and dehumanization of people. Colonizers referred to the indigenous people of America as wild beasts, slave owners associated Africans with monkeys, and the Nazis associated Jews with vermin, rats, and parasites.
Conceived by Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister in Hitler's government, the film The Eternal Jew, directed by Fritz Hippler, in 1940, is a good summary of the Nazi project of animalization of the Jews (KERSHAW, 2018). The Eternal Jew It is a documentary that displays images accompanied by a narrated text.
A passage from the film contrasts images of rats with graphic images of the physical degradation of Jews in the Lodz ghetto in Poland: “A parallel to this Jewish immigration throughout the world is the mass immigration of an equally restless animal: the rat. As parasites, rats have accompanied humans since the beginning. (…) Wherever they appear, they bring ruin to the land, destroying the goods and food of humanity. This is how they spread diseases: plague, cholera, dysentery, leprosy, typhoid fever, and so on. They are cunning, cowardly, and cruel. They usually appear in large herds. Among animals, rats represent the element of insidious and subterranean destruction, as Jews among human beings” (HIPLER, 1940, 16m 56s-17m 36s; FISCHLOCK, 2010, p. 39).
Next, the narrator presents supposed data on the worldwide percentage of Jews involved in a series of crimes: “34% of drug trafficking, 47% of robberies, 47% of fraudulent gambling, 82% of international criminal organizations and 98% of prostitute trafficking” (FISCHLOCK, 2010, p. 39-40).
In the final part, the film shows scenes of the Jewish ritual of Kosher slaughter, which did not use anesthesia on animals. The narrator states that National Socialism was “against this cruel torture of defenseless animals” (FISCHLOCK, 2010, p. 48). In fact, Nazism incorporated some demands of the conservationist movement (UEKOETTER, 2006). In November 1933, with Hitler in power, the Animal Protection Law was passed, prohibiting slaughter without anesthesia (ANIMAL PROTECTION LAW, 1933).
For the Nazis, there was no contradiction between advocating dignified treatment of animals and turning Jews into “human animals” (Men's clothing), subject to all forms of violence and humiliation (MOHNHAUPT, 2022). In the hierarchy created by the Nazis, Jews were equated with parasites that needed to be exterminated.
Best known for his books about his experience as a prisoner in Auschwitz, Primo Levi also wrote chronicles, essays and poems on various themes related to animals (MENEZES, 2023).
The animalization and dehumanization of Jews by the Nazis is also part of Primo Levi’s texts on concentration camps. In the essay “Racial Intolerance,” Levi narrates a moment in Auschwitz, when young Hitler supporters went to visit the camp to see the state of the prisoners: “They were taken there, on a guided tour, to see us collecting the rubble; and the instructors’ speech – they didn’t bother to keep it a secret, to speak quietly – was as follows: – You see, it’s clear that we keep them in the concentration camp and force them to work, because they are not men, if you look closely; they have long beards, they don’t wash themselves, they are dirty, they don’t even know how to speak, they are only good for using shovels and pickaxes, so it’s clear that we are forced to treat them this way, as one would treat a domestic animal” (2016a, p. 195).
In his chronicles and poems about animals, Primo Levi shows compassion for sufferings similar to those he experienced in Auschwitz. In the chronicle “The Squirrel,” Levi describes the torment of a small animal in a laboratory test for insomnia. Locked in a cage, the squirrel was forced to run nonstop on an electric treadmill so that scientists could monitor and record the effects on its body of the lack of rest and sleep:
“The squirrel was exhausted: it trotted heavily on that endless road and reminded me of the galley rowers and those who were forced, in China, to walk for days and days inside cages similar to that one to raise water for irrigation canals. There was no one in the laboratory; I turned off the motor switch, the cage stopped and the squirrel fell asleep at that very moment” (LEVI, 2016b, p. 108).
Impacted by the film The Eternal Jew, in the graphic novel Mouse: the story of a survivor, cartoonist and writer Art Spiegelman tells the story of his father's experience as a prisoner in Auschwitz (SPIEGELMAN, 2011). The title of the novel comes from one of the German words that translate “rat”. It is likely that it was chosen because its sound is reminiscent of the English word “mouse”, pointing to a comparison with Mickey Mouse (MENEZES, 2023).
The features of Spiegelman's mice are simple, without smiles, without anger, without expression: “mouse heads that are basically triangles with no mouth, just the nose and eyes, very different from Mickey Mouse with his smiling have-a-nice-day face” (SPIEGELMAN, 2011, p. 145).
The biggest exception to this is the drawing that depicts one of the terrible forms of extermination in Auschwitz: “They were bringing the Jews from Hungary. There were too many people. So they built these pits. (…) The prisoners who worked there threw gasoline on the living and the dead. They strained the fat from the bodies and threw it back to burn better” (SPIELGELMAN, 1995, p. 72). According to Spiegelman, “the screaming mouth covers the face, this is a way of making it human” (2011, p. 145).
The expressionless faces suggest that the mouse is merely a mask that can be removed. This device opens a way for the characters in this story, including Holocaust survivors such as Vladek Spiegelman, the cartoonist's father, to question the masks that have been imposed on them.
To this day, the animalization of opposing groups is used to justify genocides. In the 2007s, in Rwanda, the Hutus developed a campaign to exterminate the Tutsis by associating them with cockroaches (ADEKUNLE, 2023). In October 2023, shortly after the Hamas terrorist attack that resulted in the death of more than a thousand civilians, Yoav Gallant, Israel's defense minister, made the following statement: “I have ordered a complete siege of the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything closed! We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly” (NO COMMENT TV, XNUMX).
In 2001, ten days after the September 11 attacks, Jacques Derrida received the Theodor Adorno Prize in Frankfurt. In his acceptance speech, Derrida (2002) weaves together excerpts from texts by Adorno and other authors. At the end of the speech, Jacques Derrida briefly analyzes a passage by Theodor Adorno on Kantian philosophy and animals.
This passage is a discovery by Jacques Derrida, since it was hidden in a book about Beethoven’s philosophy of music: “What seems so suspicious to me in Kantian ethics is the ‘dignity’ that it assigns to man in the name of autonomy. The capacity for moral self-determination is attributed to human beings as an absolute advantage – as a moral gain – secretly claimed to legitimize domination. (…) Ethical dignity in Kant is a demarcation of differences. It is directed against animals. Covertly, it excludes man from nature, in such a way that, at every moment, his humanity threatens to transform into inhumanity. It leaves no room for compassion. (…) Animals play in the idealist system practically the same role as Jews do in fascism. Insulting people by calling them animals, that is pure idealism” (ADORNO, 1998, p. 80).
In addition to the speech given in Frankfurt, Jacques Derrida analyzes this passage from Adorno in: The animal that I soon am. In this book, he highlights the similarity between Theodor Adorno's interpretation of Kantian idealism and Nazism: “This notion of insult does not only involve verbal aggression, but an aggression that consists of degrading, demeaning, devaluing, in short, challenging someone's dignity” (2006, p. 143).
In the article “Animal dignity in the justification of animal rights”, legal philosopher Carlos Frederico de Jesus (2022) analyzes some of the main theories that question the assumptions of Kantian ethics of dignity, in particular, the theories of Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Gary Francione and Cristine Korsgaard. In the introduction to the text, Carlos Jesus highlights a common element in these theories:
“Perhaps due to the initial theoretical incompatibility of the Kantian concept of dignity with its application to non-rational beings, attempts to attribute rights to animals generally start from another point: sentience. The capacity of animals for pain allows us to defend a minimum of legal protection for them, after all, they can suffer, even if they cannot reason. Even without being ends in themselves, they feel pain and this pain has ethical relevance” (2022, p. 30).
This ethical and philosophical debate on the Kantian concept of dignity is fundamental to any possibility of legal change regarding animal rights. It would be important, however, that we also promote a broad educational debate on the treatment of animals.
In a conference, Theodor Adorno (1998) asks about the possibility of an education concerned with forming people who do not accept, nor tolerate, genocides like that promoted by the Nazis in the Auschwitz extermination camps.
Such education, states Theodor Adorno, would need to open up richer educational prospects than those enjoyed by the Nazis, who proved to be manipulative, controlling people and completely incapable of carrying out direct human experiences, as well as cultivating and expressing emotions (1998, p. 86).
In contrast to this, the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (2003), who experienced the horrors of concentration camps, supports the priority of the other and otherness in the formation of subjectivity (SILVA, 2017).
According to Lévinas, it is necessary to prepare oneself for otherness, it is necessary to prepare oneself to have human experiences. It is about exposing oneself to the other without masks and without defenses (LEVINAS, 2003). In this same perspective, the philosopher of education Jorge Larrosa understands the subject of experience from passion and suffering, but also from receptivity, availability, and the essential openness to the other and to our own transformation.
Certainly, an education for otherness also involves the relationship we establish with animals, with their vulnerabilities, their afflictions, their affections. In a certain way, this is what José do Patrocínio, Isaac Singer, Primo Levi, Art Spieguelman, Jacques Derrida and all those who responded to dehumanization with concern and care for animals did. [I]
* Paulo Fernandes Silveira Professor at the Faculty of Education at USP and researcher at the Human Rights Group at the Institute for Advanced Studies at USP.
References
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Note
[I] Paper presented at the IX World Congress on Bioethics and Animal Law, USP Law School, November 7 and 8, 2024.
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