“더 타자적인 타자”로서의 동물들: J.M. 쿳시의 「노년의 여성과 고양이들」에 나타난 동물윤리

J.M. Coetzee has given considerable attention to animal suffering, beginning with two Princeton lectures in the interesting form of fiction: “The Philosophers and the Animals” and “The Poets and the Animals.” Disgrace, his second Booker Prize-winning novel, takes up animal ethics as an integral part of the narrative. And his 2003 short story “The Old Woman and the Old Cats” reiterates and extends animal ethics he has powerfully developed in the previous works. The story brings into the narrative what Coetzee calls “conversion experience.” Elizabeth Costello, the same protagonist who appeared in the previous works such as two Princeton lectures and the eponymous Elizabeth Costello, comes across a female cat who is giving birth. Being a mother of two, she identifies with the female cat: “I too am a mother.” This corresponds to “conversion experience”: giving-over and surrender to “mute appeal of the kind that Levinas calls the look, in which the existential autonomy of the Other became irrefutable.” The story is a powerful testimony to how one can become responsive to mute appeal of the defenseless, naked animals who are abandoned when necessity demands. In so doing, the story provides a critique on Levinas’s anthropocentric philosophy in which the face always remains, to quote from Derrida, “a fraternal and human face.” It sides with and affirms Derrida for whom the animal is “more radically other than the other in whom I recognize my fellow or my neighbor.”