An Ethics of Becoming-Animal in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe

This paper explores the animalization of Friday and the becoming-animal of Cruso in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, developing this discussion through a critical comparison between Giorgio Agamben’s and Gilles Deleuze’s ethical reflections on animality. Both Agamben and Deleuze criticize the animal-human demarcation for exhibiting a prejudiced “anthropocentrism,” one that has long been central to the West’s conception of a human. The conception of a zone of indiscernibility is thereby central to Agamben’s and Deleuze’s ethics of animality. While Agamben’s theories offer potentialities for opening the relationship between human and animal, there are also limitations. Agamben’s ethics is based on an abyssal difference between human and animal, which ultimately plays out within the division between human and animal. In Agamben’s discourse of animality, Friday, with his muteness and his mutilated tongue is presented as a non-human animal by the narrator, Barton. In contrast with Agamben, Deleuze’s notion of becoming-animal implies the exchange between human and animal via affect, a zone in which humans and animals are involved in a continuous interrelational interplay. Deleuze’s approach diverges somewhat from the postcolonial and deconstructive approaches towards Friday taken by G. Scott Bishop, Derek Attridge and Gayatri Spivak, where Friday’s animalization is more associated with Barton’s constitution of herself as a possessor of language or humanness. Barton’s anthropological morality is sharply divergent from Cruso’s interaction with Friday, the latter being an affective relationship where the boundaries between human and animal become blurred. By focusing on this relationship, I will demonstrate how Deleuze’s theory of affect offers new potentialities for reconceptualising the boundaries between human and animal.