The Animal at Unease with Itself. Isaac M. Alderman

      LEXINGTON BOOKS/FORTRESS ACADEMIC

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      British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

       Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Alderman, Isaac, 1977- author.

      Title: The animal at unease with itself : death anxiety and the

      animal-human boundary in Genesis 2-3 / Isaac Alderman.

      Description: Lanham : Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2020. | Includes

      bibliographical references and index. | Summary: "In this book, Isaac

      Alderman uses insights from the cognitive study of death anxiety and

      disgust to examine the animal-human boundary in Genesis 2-3, providing

      biblical scholars with a case study for how this interdisciplinary

      approach can be used to analyze texts that deal with themes of

      mortality, the human body, or the animal-human boundary"-- Provided by

      publisher.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2020018580 (print) | LCCN 2020018581 (ebook) | ISBN

      9781978702912 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978702929 (epub)

      Subjects: LCSH: Bible. Genesis, II-III--Criticism, interpretation, etc. |

      Death--Religious aspects--Christianity. | Human body--Religious

      aspects--Christianity. | Human-animal relationships--Religious

      aspects--Christianity.

      Classification: LCC BS1235.52 .A44 2020 (print) | LCC BS1235.52 (ebook) |

      DDC 222/.1106--dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018580

      LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018581

      For Christina.

       After two decades spent together talking about the Bible and art—and the Bible as art—I have repeatedly thought about Melville’s response to the one he loved: Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality.

      Acknowledgments

      There are many people to thank for their assistance in the preparation of this book. First and foremost, thank you to Dr. David Bosworth for his guidance and suggestions; also to Fr. Christopher Begg and Dr. Robert Miller II for their careful reading, and to Dr. Caroline Sherman and Dr. Michael Gorman for their valuable comments regarding my work.

      I have gained a great deal of insight and needed support from my good friends Dr. Maria Rodriguez, Fr. Eric Wagner, and Eric Trinka, who also read my manuscript and provided valuable feedback. I also want to thank my very good friend Juan Miguel Betancourt for keeping in touch throughout the process.

      I would like to thank Neil Elliott, the senior acquisitions editor at Lexington/Fortress Academic. This has taken much longer than I expected, and so thank you for your patience with my frequently changing and wildly unrealistic timelines.

      Finally, thank you, Christina, for your incredible support throughout this process.

      Introduction

      Many scholars are now pursuing interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the Bible and the ancient Near East by drawing on the insights from the study of cognition and emotion. To my knowledge, there has not yet been any biblical study which applies the work of terror management theorists, nor has the concept of animal reminder disgust been utilized to better understand the opening chapters of Genesis. The first part of this book (chapters 1 and 2) introduces biblical scholars to some of the current application of cognitive science to the study of the Bible and the ancient Near East. This is a broad topic, and I will narrow it by also introducing terror management theory and the cognitive implications of death anxiety. The second part (chapters 3–7) deals with issues of human bodies, the bodies of non-human animals, death, and clothing. It is necessary to cover these topics because their presence and interaction in Genesis 2–3 is the point of the third section (chapters 8–9). My purpose in writing this book is to demonstrate, using Genesis 2–3 as a case study, the usefulness of accounting for the cognitive implications of death anxiety when reading biblical texts that deal with themes of mortality, the human body, or the animal-human boundary.

      The philosopher Jacques Derrida reflected on the biblical account of creation and life in the garden, which was brought to his mind as he began to dress. He noticed his cat looking at him and was surprised to find that, for a brief moment, he experienced embarrassment. Why should he feel ashamed or embarrassed, “when caught naked, in silence, by the gaze of an animal?”^[1] His cat cannot be aware of his nudity, because she herself is naked and unashamed.

      Ashamed of what and before whom? Ashamed of being as naked as an animal. It is generally thought . . . that the property unique to animals and what in the final analysis distinguishes them from man, is their being naked without knowing it. Not being naked therefore, not having knowledge of their nudity, in short without consciousness of good and evil.^[2]

      In turning to reflect on the relationship between shame, nakedness, clothing, and the recognition of animal nature, Derrida focuses on the movement from the beginning of “this awful tale of Genesis,” where immodesty is unknown, to the end, where the animal that is human knows itself, “the only [animal] to have invented a garment to cover his sex”; for the human, “knowing himself would mean knowing himself to be ashamed.”^[3] In “crossing borders or the ends of man I come to surrender to the animal—to the animal in itself, to the animal in me and the animal at unease with itself.”^[4] Derrida draws our attention to a radical existence in Genesis 2, one in which the human animal is unaware of its animality and, therefore, unaware of its nakedness.

      There is no nudity “in nature.” There is only the sentiment, the affect, the (conscious or unconscious) experience of existing in nakedness. Because it is naked, without existing in nakedness, the animal neither feels nor sees itself naked. And it therefore is not naked.^[5]

      It is the awareness of that animality that compels humans to invent clothing. In telling us of his embarrassment when being seen naked by his cat, Derrida emphasizes the fact that a human who is unashamed of his animality is as otherworldly as conversant snakes or trees whose fruit can give knowledge or immortality.

      Now more than 150 years ago, Darwin made it impossible for