인간, 동물, “존재의 충만함”: 쿳시와 로렌스

Focusing on J. M. Coetzee’s “the Lives of Animals,” this essay purports to probe his thinking on ‘the question of the animal’ and compare it with that of D. H Lawrence. These two pieces of writing were originally presented as lectures, then published as a book under the same title, and finally incorporated into a novel titled Elizabeth Costello. In the novel, the eponymous main character gives a series of lectures in which she presents herself as ‘an animal’, deeply wounded by sufferings of animals in the world today and people’s indifference to them. She vehemently criticizes the anthropocentric understanding of animals in the Western philosophy, putting emphasis on fullness of being, embodiedness, and joy of life. Through her lectures and other related scenes, Coetzee explores the possibility of an ethical relationship between humans and animals, based on the vulnerability and finitude of embodied beings. With his extraordinary sense of nonhuman otherness of animals and their fullness of being, Lawrence has also made a powerful denunciation of anthropocentrism and sought for a vital relationship with animals throughout his oeuvre. Yet there is a crucial difference between the two writers: Lawrence pays attention not only to the dimension of ‘being’, but also to that of ‘existence’, in which conflicts between species are inevitable, while Elizabeth or Coetzee exclusively focuses on the former and chooses to live as a vegetarian. The essay concludes with examining the implications of this difference in view of epochal change lying between them.