Jumping hurdles with mosquitoes

TLDR: In this paper, Haraway argues that taking response seriously means not to render animals killable; she refigures 'thou shall not kill' in ''thou should not make killable'' and asks us to pay attention to how we kill.

Abstract: The encounters with her fiery dog Cayenne take centre stage in Donna Haraway's most recent worldly intervention. Beautifully the two show us how dog ^ human relations can be practised, thought of, and written about. But how to engage with less cosy speciesösuch as mosquitoes, bugs, viruses, or parasites? In the face of (deadly) diseases transmitted by such species we tend to be less curious about whom and what we touch (page 3) or sharing suffering (chapter 3), we might instead be more inclined to ask: How to survive? Rather than wanting to seduce mosquitoes into jumping hurdles with us, those pesky creatures tend to enrol humans in unwanted night time activities: zzzzöswatö zzzzöswatözzzz. Instead of colearning with such species, much thinking is invested in avoiding intimate encounters with mosquitoes. Hence, at first sight the academic endeavours of dog and mosquito people seem far apart. However, if one looks closer mosquito and bug people might well have more in common with Haraway's concerns than one would expectöher take on the capacity to respond and the question of killing responsibly are suggestive. In the development of her concept of response-ability and the connected obligation to learn to kill responsibly Haraway engages with Jacques Derrida's contribution to the question of differences and boundaries between humans and other-thanhumans.(1) Crucial to the argument in Derrida (2002) is his neologism `animot', which consists of the French `animal' and `mot' (word). Further, if one pronounces `animot' in French it sounds exactly like `animaux', which is the plural of animal. Thus, `animot' plays with two meanings; it rejects a depiction of animals in the singular authoritative form of `the Animal' and it brings the worlds of animals and language in contact. It is important, however, that this move is not about giving animals a (human-like) voice, but recognizing them as from ``wholly other origin'' (WSM, page 382). To Derrida, it is the binary established through the Animal that renders animals killable, transforms them into an object in the logic of sacrifice, where only humans can be murdered; the Animal, however, never able to respond only to react, can be killed (or in contemporary policy language: culled). Haraway's book argues for and shows the complications of responseöboth of humans andöin Haraway speaköcritters. Following Derrida, Haraway argues that taking response seriously means not to render animals killable; she refigures `thou shall not kill' in `thou shall not make killable'. With this move Haraway emphasises the process of relating and asks us to pay attention to how we kill. She wants us to learn to kill responsibly, because: `̀The problem is actually to understand that human beings do not get a pass on the necessity of killing significant others, who are themselves responding, not just reacting . ...Try as we might to distance ourselves, there is no way of living that is not also a way of someone, not just something, else dying differentially. ... It is not killing that gets us into exterminism, but making things killable'' (page 80). Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2010, volume 28, pages 46 ^ 49